


It's the Pilot

by Truth



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: AU, Kidnapping, Multi, Terrorism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-03-30
Updated: 2010-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-14 06:42:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 47,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Truth/pseuds/Truth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I never thought it would come to this."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. It's always the pilot.

**Author's Note:**

> AU - Wherein the Gundam pilots have known each other for a little while, but the war is still stalled back before the pilots return to space. Meanwhile, someone seems to have it in for the pilots. First person stream of consciousness/POV.
> 
> This is a very old story, originally posted to a mailing list and thus still suffering from the occasional formatting error and some writing in need of improvement. My apologies.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a very, very old story, originally posted to a mailing list. There are probably some left over formatting problems as well as truly execrable writing. My apologies.

This has been the absolute worst two months of my entire life. I've never kept a diary before, but it's either that or begin talking to myself and I'm damned if I'll do that. When I finally got really desperate, I asked one of the girls here how one went about keeping a 'proper' diary. Of course, being a guy, I called it a journal. She told me that you start out by saying who you are and why you decided to keep a journal.

Riiiiiight. This is slit your throat before reading stuff, kiddies. If Heero ever finds out about this, I'm in deep shit. Not that things could get much worse than they are right now. Remember Damocles? Let me just put it this way, I've been invited to dinner at his place, and I'm not liking it much.

But as I said, it's either this or wander around mumbling under my breath and I can't afford to draw any attention to myself, or Heero won't have to worry about hunting me down. I'll be dead before he ever realizes that I'm not coming back.

So here goes.

My name is Duo Maxwell. I am fifteen years old, give or take. I think I'm sixteen, actually, but I have no way to prove it. I'm an orphan, at least I hope so. I'd hate to think that my parents just tossed me out of their lives as an infant. I have no idea who they really were or even where I was born. My first memories are of the back alleys of the colony where I grew up.

I've been a beggar, a thief and a murderer - among other things. I've seen good friends and people I loved die horribly. I was born in one of the space colonies, and I've walked on all the seven continents of the Earth. A pretty impressive list for a teenager of no particular parentage. That's not all, though.

I'm the pilot of Gundam 02 - Gundam Deathscythe. I am Shinigami, the God of Death.

And this time, I'm in over my head.

It's stupid, really. There are five Gundam pilots - Me, Heero, Quatre, Trowa and the Wu-guy. We're all very, very different and yet very much the same. We're fighting to end the tyranny of the Earth Alliance. We're fighting to free our colonies from the unjust rule of our Earth overlords.

We're fighting to bring down the Alliance and destroy OZ.

That sounds so good when you first hear it. Rhetoric usually does. After you've killed several hundred people and blown numerous military installations to shit without seeing much - if any - difference, you begin to have second thoughts. I mean, what kind of idiot sends a teenage boy in a gigantic mobile suit to deal death across the face of the Earth? The odds against my making any difference for the future of my colony are astronomical!

But I can't help but try....

Or rather, I _couldn't_ help but try. I'm not a Gundam pilot anymore. They've taken Deathscythe away and imprisoned me.

And my time is running out.

How did I get into this mess you ask? Sheer stupidity. I forgot the cardinal rule.

Trust no one.

****** Perspective Switch******

It was late afternoon when Duo Maxwell left the safe house for the last time. If he'd known that it was going to be the last time, they wouldn't have been able to pry him out of the place with a pitchfork. But he was happily oblivious to the nasty plans that fate had in store for him, and he was even humming under his breath as he disappeared into the trees.

It all sounds like a bad horror movie, doesn't it?

I stood by an upstairs window and watched him go, and I've been cursing myself ever since. I knew he was up to something. Had known, in fact, since before lunch.

Maxwell can be remarkably transparent at times.

It's amazing how well I know him after such a short time. We'd met before, of course, but I'd never been forced to spend much time with him, thankfully. The five of us have little in common, but Maxwell and I have less in common than the others.

We each pilot a Gundam, a massive machine that can deal death and destruction quickly,  
efficiently and with complete ruthlessness. Our Gundams allow us to do things individually that would be impossible even for a small army.

But it's not the Gundams that are truly special. It's the pilot.

It's always the pilot.

We'd been working as individuals, only recently realizing that we weren't alone, that there were other Gundams, other pilots. We'd never all been together at one place, but orders had been received to gather here and wait for a mission that would require all five of us.

So that's what we did, despite our separate misgivings. Wufei's displeasure was particularly vocal. He did not appreciate being cut off from his various sources of information, and he particularly did not enjoy being forced to share a roof with the rest of us. Maxwell looked on it as an opportunity to party.

Maxwell's idea of social chatter could drive a teetotaler to the bottle. The five of us had known each other for several weeks, and we were still almost total strangers. It was unsurprising, really. What were we supposed to do? Talk terrorist shop? But Maxwell had wanted to get to know us all, to get us all to loosen up.

Think party games. And when that didn't work, he went in for practical jokes.

His efforts didn't go over very well. After the third day, Chang and I weren't speaking to him and even Quatre had begun to look slightly irritated.

So when I saw him sneaking away, I just stood by the window and watched him go. I assumed it was another practical joke, or just a chance to get away from Chang's righteous wrath.

I never thought it would come to this.

He never came back. Not that night, or the next. Not that week, or even the following one. Not that month....

I could have stopped him. I could at least have said something. But I had been content to watch him disappear into the trees - relieved, even.

It was a mistake that I will never make again. However much Maxwell drove me mad, he was one of us. It was an expensive lesson to learn, and a painful one.

We are unique. Individuals. We cannot be replaced. Maxwell had wormed his way into all of our hearts, even Trowa's - even Chang's. His absence created a gaping wound which there was no way to heal. And all this after only a few weeks....

What would we five had become if he hadn't been taken away? What would have happened to us and to the Earth if we had simply taken that next mission and then gone our separate ways?

I guess we'll never know.


	2. "That's abnormal."

I don't believe I'm doing this. Maxwell is an idiot. Where he is and what he's doing are none of my concern. Why I should waste my valuable time on combing through all this non-data again is beyond me. We have hit one dead end after another. As days turned into weeks we should have given up, not continued to waste what little time we have on this stupid project.

Truthfully, this was Quatre's all idea. It usually is. Rashid told him that people who are grieving are often encouraged to write. He overlooked the fact that Quatre is practically incapable of giving up hope, and was therefore not yet grieving.

Unfortunately, Quatre took this idea one step further, as is his usual habit. He asked me to write something. He opened those impossibly innocent blue eyes and said, "Please, you really are the best at this sort of thing. There must be something that we've overlooked. If you write it all down, maybe you'll see something that we missed."

Someone will patent that look of his some day and we will all be in serious trouble.

This is not a very good idea. Stream of consciousness writing is supposed to be an effective tool to combat grief, but I doubt it will do anything to help me find a line of reasoning that we have not already explored. However, we have tried everything else that we can think of, both individually and collectively. I might as well give it a try. After all, what have I got to lose?

Three months ago, Duo Maxwell disappeared. Literally.

We were all together for once, staying at a place that Quatre knew about. We still don't know each other very well, and were keeping mostly to ourselves while we waited for new orders to come in. Mostly.

Maxwell was not content simply to have us all together in one place. He had to socialize. Despite the less than warm response from everyone save Quatre, he persevered. There were strange games, practical jokes and various and sundry bizarre antics until I, personally, was ready to kill him just to gain some much needed peace and quiet.

And then he was gone.

I don't mean that he went out on a mission and never came back, I mean that he vanished.  
Disappeared. Wafted away on an evening breeze. We didn't even miss him for several days. That is, we noticed that he was gone right away. We just didn't miss him. It wasn't until the third day of his unexplained absence that Quatre decided to check his room. And that's when we knew that something had gone seriously wrong.

All of his belongings were still there, save whatever clothing he was wearing. Even the leather coat had been left behind. I think that the coat is what forces me to believe that he had believed that he would be coming back. He loved that coat to the point of obsessing over it. Some oversized bully tried to beat him up in an alley outside of a bar (and what he was doing there in the first place I do not want to know) when I came looking for him. I put the drunken idiot down and Maxwell took his jacket, claiming it as 'spoils of war'.

Maxwell practices lunacy as some sort of personal art form. He could have been killed. However, that didn't seem to faze him and he danced all the way back to our Gundams, almost enveloped in the long black coat. If he knew that he would be gone for more than a few days, he would have taken it with him. Ergo, he did not know that he would not be coming back.

But I digress.

He was gone. Completely. Without a trace. And when I say without a trace, I am not  
exaggerating. We've searched. We've checked every contact, hacked every computer system we could think of. We begged, borrowed and stole anything we thought would provide a clue. We searched his computer files, traced his last messages, demanded information from his control.... And still, nothing.

The silence was more than oppressive. It was frightening.

And what were we to do when we came to the end of our own resources? It's not as though we could call the local police and report him missing. And even if we could, what would we say? "Hello. I would like to report a missing idiot. He has a long braid, a big mouth - oh, and by the way, he is apparently bouncing around somewhere in a gigantic machine of mass destruction. Answers to the name 'Shinigami'."

That's right. He took the Gundam with him. And we can't find it anywhere either.

Despite our reputation as faceless terrorists and assassins, it is almost impossible to hide a  
Gundam from someone who knows how it's done. Maxwell took that massive black behemoth and just walked away. There are no transports of any type capable of transporting a Gundam either missing, sold or reported hijacked. None. There have been no reports of a psychotic death-dealing black Gundam either. It's as if he simply disappeared, and that's just not possible.

There is no physical way that he could have taken that Gundam from the area without leaving some sort of trail, some clue we would pick up on. We went so far as to hack into the nearest OZ base to see if he'd turned himself in. Nothing. I had suspected as much. There is no way that the OZ leadership would not be spouting such a coup from every news channel in the Federation.

After the first month, we stopped looking. I don't mean that we gave up, we had simply  
exhausted every logical lead. A few weeks later, Quatre pointed out that Maxwell is, by nature, illogical. This observation led to another round of more bizarre inquiries which proved equally fruitless.

Unsurprisingly....

After the second month, the other two gave him up for dead. I don't know what they thought he did with the Gundam. There weren't any strange explosions or gundanium debris reported. Quatre was the only one still pressing the search. I....

I'm not sure what I believe. After we left the safe-house, Quatre took all of Maxwell's belongings with him. It was a bit frightening to see just how much stuff he had accumulated in just the few weeks he had been with us. Quatre was sure that he'd simply reappear and demand to know what we'd done with his things.

Self-delusion can be contagious. Perhaps I just wanted to believe it too. I helped him pack it all up.

The second time all four of us met, Quatre quietly disposed of most of the baggage. Maxwell's shampoo and conditioner can still be found in the bathroom whenever the four of us meet up. I don't know who put them out the first time, but I took them away with me once. I caught Quatre quietly inhaling the scent from the bottles on another occasion, tears in his eyes. He told me that he knew Maxwell was still alive, just not where.

I kept the coat.

I don't know why I did that. It's not something that I would ever wear, though Maxwell did try to get me to put it on once. He said it felt like a full body hug. Something to do with the weight. I remember telling him that I had no interest in 'hugs' and snarling at him to be serious. He ignored me, as usual.

I have all the reports that we ran, searching for him. Both the logical, precise ones and the  
illogical, random ones. I have sifted through them over and over, looking for some clue, some hint as to how he disappeared so completely.

He's still alive. He must be. If he were dead, surely we would have heard. One fifteen year old boy can disappear easily. We've all done it. But we know all the tricks, so we should have been able to find him equally easily. But he remained missing.

And the Gundam....

No one can explain that, and we've all tried. Professor G keeps sending messages to Maxwell's accounts, demanding a response. No one has accessed those accounts but us since the day we discovered that he wasn't coming back.

It's been three months now. The four of us are together again. We don't talk about Maxwell at all anymore. Even Professor G has stopped leaving messages. But I know there's a clue here somewhere. Something that we've overlooked. There must be.

I've gone over the reports again and again. So has Quatre. So have the others, even if they won't admit it. The pages are becoming dog-eared and torn. What are we missing. What am I missing?

Maxwell isn't dead. I'm sure of it now. Perhaps Quatre was right. Just the act of writing it all down seems to have brought something to the surface that I was not even aware of. Maxwell is alive. The only question is, where?

**

Quatre peered cautiously into the room where the tap, tap, tap of the laptop had attracted his attention. The other two pilots looked in over his shoulders.

"I didn't think he'd actually sit down and do it," the blonde boy breathed. "He's been working at it for hours."

"That's abnormal," was the flat comment from behind him.

Quatre turned to observe the speaker with slack jawed amazement. Trowa also turned, though his face bore his usual impassive expression.

"Abnormal for Wufei," Heero clarified defensively.

"Ahhhh."

**

Of course, I could just be grasping at straws. Quatre is right, I do know a great deal about  
grieving. Maybe this is his way of trying to get me to see that I'm in denial.

Maybe I am.

It doesn't seem right that someone so full of life and compassion should just disappear as if they've never been. And that sparks a new idea.

It never occurred to any of us that Maxwell would just wander off. Looking back at the sort of person he normally appears to be - that should have been one of the logical assumptions. But we know him better than that. We've all fought with him, seen his determination. None of us even considered that as a serious option.

I think that's the missing piece. Someone wants us to think that Maxwell just wandered away on his own, like the fool he so enjoys pretending to be.

This whole project is starting to irritate me. Maxwell is a fool. No, that's unjust. Whatever else he may or may not be, he's not the type to just walk away from something that needs to be done. If he left under his own power, which is fairly obvious, he had to have a damn good reason. But whoever took him....

I'm beginning to sound like one of those damned crime shows that Heero is so fond of.

....was probably counting on our not seeing past Maxwell's frivolous exterior. They want us to believe that he just left - abandoning us and our mission.

That leads me to two conclusions.

Maxwell is still alive, and he's in trouble.

Typical.


	3. Did I mention that I'm in love?

Hi. It's me.

I am in deep shit. Really deep shit. What the hell was I thinking!?

There I was, minding my own business. Okay, minding Trowa's business, but it's the same thing really. That boy needs to learn how to open up and....

Right.

I guess the point is that I wasn't thinking. I tend to trust people. It's this little problem that I have. I think that this adventure has cured me of that particular failing. Permanently.

Anyway, there I was, not bothering anyone, and I get this message. It's from the Prof and he wants me to sneak off to the OZ base. Apparently there's some disaffected personnel who want to help the colonies and have agreed to smuggle Deathscythe and me back to outer space for a refit.

This was cool! After all, Shinigami should have all the latest toys to play with, right? And the secrecy stuff was okay too. Why let the other mad scientists know that the Prof's got something new? When a guy's got a chance to get ahead, he oughtta take it!

It was easy to get away. I waited until the others were busy avoiding me (yeah, some days I just feel so loved) and simply walked away. I met the Munchkins

(little Oz guys, get it?)

at the base and they loaded up Deathscythe for me and we were off. I guess the schedule  
shipment had been delayed, but they needed the shuttle up above for something in a hurry, so it was supposed to go up empty. With the crew covering for me, who would notice that a supposedly empty armaments shuttle was carrying a Gundam?

A lot of people, actually. The OZ organization would be a truly terrifying military machine if the Alliance ever actually realized the resource it had sitting right under its nose. On the other hand, as a small, self-governed organization, it has fewer fail-safes against bribery and traitors than the mostly bureaucratic Alliance.

Lucky for me, I guess.

They unpacked my Gundam for me once we were in space and I was off. I got to the super-secret-hidden-base (sounds so much better than 'Prof G's lab, dontchaknow) and that was that.

Only that wasn't that.

They took Deathscythe away to be completely rebuilt from the ground up - and they wouldn't let me watch. They wouldn't let me see what they were doing or even hint as to the upgrades. Something was up.

To make matters worse, when the Prof finally got around to seeing me.... Well, I'll take Heero at his most psychopathic any day. I could just see the word 'deprogramming' in the Prof's eyes when he looked at me. I managed to get away in one piece, though.

I was on my absolute best behavior for the rest of the day.

But still, I was completely in the dark. My room didn't have a computer hook up and I wasn't encouraged to roam. Not too strange. The Prof thinks that I'm deranged and he doesn't want me and my practical jokes 'underfoot'. But I usually at least got network access....

For the first few days I just stayed in my room and read. Not my usual style, you say? Damn right. But the Prof has very low 'shit tolerance' levels and I try very hard not to cross him. Didn't think I had any self-control, didja? Heh. Shows what you know. I can be quiet and controlled if I have to. Well, for a little while, anyway.

I started sneaking out of my room after the sixth day. It was child's play to hook the monitors so they showed me napping or reading. I started to explore.

It didn't take very long to realize that none of my old passcodes worked anymore. Again, not too strange. Secret underground organizations don't usually make it easy for people to get in. Of course, I'm not 'people'. I'm not Heero either, unfortunately. But I did my best. Took me all of twenty minutes to gain full access to the Prof's system.

My first foray into the computer systems showed me the new and improved (work-still-in-progress) Deathscythe. I fell in love all over again. Then I was interrupted and didn't have time to do more than cover my tracks.

My second foray into the computer system showed that the Prof was still sending me mission parameters at my old accounts. I was smart enough not to access them myself. I also found that Trowa and Quatre had both sent queries as to my whereabouts. I hadn't really thought they'd miss me.

He'd answered that he had no idea where I was. All right, I knew that he didn't want to let them know where I was, but sending missions to me when he knew I wasn't there seemed to be pushing it. But I didn't want to risk my chances with those marvelous upgrades, so I stayed pretty quiet.

More fool me.

It wasn't until the second week that I first saw him. 'Him' who? My fucking replacement, that's who. He's not as smart or as fast as me and it's a damn good thing. Otherwise he might have seen me. I do not want to let the Prof know that I know that he thinks I'm fucking expendable.

All right, that's pretty unreasonable. I've always known that I was expendable. But to take  
Deathscythe away, to spruce it up and make it so much more incredible and then to give it to some thirteen year old brat who'll get blown up the first time he takes a mission?  
Yeah, I'm ranting. So fuck you. I've got one hell of a good reason to be pissed. I'm overreacting, too. Hang on.... I'm NOT overreacting. Not one bit. I've given my life to these bozos! That's really what's making me angry, I guess. They own me. Underneath it all I'm just as driven as Heero. I don't think I can live without Deathscythe, without being Shinigami. But even if I could, I couldn't live with being replaced by a fucking incompetent.

So, what to do?

Good question. I've been watching this kid for a month now. He's pretty good all right. He'd even make a pretty impressive mobile suit pilot. But as far as ranking with us Gundam pilots? No way. Not only that, I don't think you guys would put up with him for a red hot minute. Heero would eat him for breakfast. Hell, I don't think even Quatre would like him. The kid's a complete pig.

Man, it hurts to watch him fumble around with MY Gundam and then try to tell the crew what to do to fix the thing so it 'works better'. The problem isn't with my beautiful Deathscythe - it's the pilot. It's always the pilot. I could take that glorious machine and wreak havoc the likes of which mankind has never seen. He can't make it through a simple armaments test without fucking up. It's almost embarrassing to watch. He can't hope to replace me.

And that started me thinking.

I know, I know. Spare me, okay? I've heard all the cracks and wiseass comments. Here's where things get very, very scary.

Why would the Prof even consider replacing me, with my almost perfect track record, for this, this incompetent? I watched the tests for almost a week, trying to think of something. That's when it hit me. The kid might boss the crew, but his attitude toward the Prof or anyone else who might actually be considered his superior was... obedient? Not quite the right word, let me think on this for a bit.

Anyway, I've got a smart mouth. What, did you think I was oblivious? I've always thought my narrative style was quite individual. But of all the things that I'm not -

Docile, that's the word I wanted!

\- docile is probably one thing I'll never be. But I think I can fake it. It may be my only chance to get back to you guys.

Not that you've missed me.

At any rate, I placed a few bugs about the old tomb and got an earful. Apparently, the Prof has decided that a pilot more along the lines of Heero or Trowa would be more 'effective' than me. Hey, no one can be better than Shinigami! No one!

That's when I decided that I'd better write this down. I need to warn the others. I need to warn you. I'm not the only one in danger of being replaced. That's right, you've got problems too. You just don't know it yet.

I can just hear you, "Get to the point, idiot!" I'll get there in my own sweet time and thank you for caring.

Anyway, I decided that being all quiet and polite was getting me nowhere fast. It'd been four or five weeks and I was still mostly shut up in my room. So I volunteered to help fix things, do odd jobs around the place. Man, I love gadgets and machinery!

This got me out of my room and around and about the base. I did repairs, I helped with some wiring and fusing projects. All of this under supervision, of course. I was still being very quiet and polite. Think Quatre on downers. Or maybe Trowa on happy pills. Just a little repressed, but oh so proper.

I then made a very serious mistake. The Prof called me down to see Deathscythe. He wanted me to take it out for a little test drive. I was ecstatic. The little punk was lurking in the background, smirking. He'd never seen or met me and had no clue who I was. Of course, I know I don't look like much, but it would have been nice to imagine that people can recognize Shinigami when they see him. I could tell he was dying to see me screw up in front of the Prof.

Fool. You never give your opponent an opportunity like that one.

I took my baby out and stood it on it's head, literally. Have you ever noticed how the Oz suits always fight pointing the same way up, even in zero gravity? Heh, an accident waiting to happen. I took on the test situation from 180 degree angles and 90 degree dives. I killed everything out there and in record time, too. I put myself through moves even I wouldn't have thought possible.

Did I mention that I'm in love?

I was amazing!!!! Shinigami lives!!!

And when I got out, the Prof asked me what I thought. And I told him that it wasn't flexible enough. I mean, really, it wasn't anywhere near as flexible as the original Deathscythe. The little punk hadn't even begun to explore the limits of what could be done, and as a result, bugs were gonna show up later.

I didn't say that last bit out loud, but it must have shown in my eyes. He knew that I knew. Shit. And where did that little exchange get me? Not back with Deathscythe where I belong. Nope. I was sent to fucking military school! That's right, military school. I don't know what strings Prof G pulled, but I'm currently enrolled at a boarding school for the children of the OZ elite. The military bound, OZ elite. Man, this sucks, and it gets worse. How, you may ask?

I'm enrolled as Duo Maxwell, nephew and sole heir of one Zechs Marquise. All they left out was the pretty red bow and the fucking gift tag.

And the goddamn school is on a satellite station. They monitor everything coming in and  
everything going out. I'm not sure if they're guarding against kidnappers, terrorists or school escapees, but they are sure as hell paranoid around here. I was practically delivered in handcuffs.

Don't ask me how the Prof did it, I just hope to God that Zechs continues to stay far, far away from the school. So here I sit, studying (for lack of anything better to do). I can't even indulge in a little espionage. The nasty little brats here are all aristocrats, and they watch each other like a bunch of rabid and starving weasels. And the whole place is run like a goddamned prison. Did I mention the lovely atmosphere of cold vacuum?

The aristocracy hate the commoners. There aren't many actual commoners here, though. The ones that I do see are all scholarship students. I guess that this place has a really good reputation. I'm not having any trouble, though. Well, not with the schoolwork. It's pretty obvious that I'm common as dirt and the little rich boys (Sorry, Quatre) have decided that I must be a bastard child of some sort and that makes me fair game. I've managed to stay out of any fights, got to keep a low profile, ya know? But it's been close a couple of times. I really don't want attention drawn to myself. Which brings me to my next problem.

I can't escape. Really. Man, I'm trapped here. They watch these kids 24/7. They did a strip search and went through my luggage both at the base and when I got here. I haven't got anything to get myself out of here with and no idea what I could do or where I could go if I did. Prison, only with homework. Could life possibly get any more frustrating?

Don't answer that.

One the bright side, I've got an expense account here at the school that would make Quatre sit up and take notice, and the staff here apparently has a real thing for bribes. Well, as long as you're not asking them to smuggle anything in more exciting than a girly mag or a box of chocolate. If this letter makes it to you, it'll be worth what they're charging. Hell, it's not my money anyway! I'm sending copies to four of the drops that I know you use, that way you should get at least one.

Be careful, Wu. You're also on the list of expendables. I guess you have some dark secret past, 'cause they were muttering about 'emotionally unstable elements' and 'questionable family attachments'. Take my advice. Pack up Shenlong and get the hell out of Dodge. If they can't catch you, they can't wad you up and throw you away.

That's really what they've done to me. It's only a matter of time before Zechs finds out about me, and you know what that'll mean. Be careful, man. I can't stress that enough.

Oh, and if the little shit shows up down there, make sure he's on the ground before you kill him. Don't want him bleeding on my Deathscythe.


	4. So maybe I am a manipulative little bastard.

Things have been very unhappy and unsettled of late. Duo's disappearance hit all of us hard, although some of us hid it better than others.

When I went looking for Wufei this morning, he was gone. I found a stack of papers on his bed with a note addressed to me on the top. With a nasty, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach I sat down and read them all.

I suspected as much.

It had to be Wufei, in the end. I don't think that I could have gotten either Trowa or Heero to take the proper steps to resolve the situation before it was too late. I was pretty sure that I could reach Wufei, though.

Wufei's very self-contained and he dwells on things far too much. However, this same  
introspection is what gives him his strength.

I tried very hard to push him in the proper direction and it had been remarkably easy. All it took was a quiet request and a heart-felt plea. The 'innocently adorable' look (Duo's phrase) didn't hurt either.

I'm not really terribly manipulative. People just tend to respond better to gentle requests than to brusque orders. Why be unkind if you don't need to?

At any rate, I read through Wufei's note, his interesting little vignette (I'd been wondering about that coat) and the letter from Duo. This was not good. It explained a lot, however. Duo can be rather remarkably resourceful sometimes. Luckily.

I am grateful that he sent us this warning. I was relieved to hear that he was still alive and in one piece. I was very, very upset...

Zechs Merquise is not someone that any of us want to tangle with, not without our Gundams, anyway. Heero has a healthy respect for the Lightning Count and his combat tactics that he was quick to share with the rest of us. More worrisome, to me at least, is Zechs' rather nasty habit of turning up at the right place at the wrong time.

Duo is in a very nasty spot, right now.

I took the entire sheaf of papers downstairs and began to work my way through them a second time, paying special attention to Duo's letter. That's when the first message arrived.

S wanted to know if I'd seen or spoken to Wufei recently. I replied truthfully that I had not neither seen nor spoken to Wufei in several days. I then laid Duo's letter aside and turned to Wufei's note. There were a number of things that he needed from me and very little time in which to do them.

Over the next two hours I buried myself in money transfers, sponsorship papers, courier  
arrangements and travel permits. Wufei had left a detailed list for me of exactly what he required for this operation. Smart, very smart. Among the countless couriers employed by my sisters and my father, what would be one more? Wufei knew what he was doing.

So did I.

When I was finished, I picked up Duo's letter and began going over it again. There was  
something about it that was bothering me. I wasn't sure quite what it was yet, however. Aside from the obvious, that is.

That was when the second message arrived. S wanted to know if I could creep away and bring Sandrock back to the colony. I was forced to tell him that the other two pilots were keeping a close eye on me, and that I would not be unable to escape undetected.

I know a trap when I see it.

What I had told him was also no less than the truth. Heero and Trowa were prowling the house like a pair of caged tigers. Or lions, as the case may be. Their restlessness gives me new hope. Perhaps we really are more than just a group of people thrown together by chance. Perhaps we can make a difference....

Rashid says that I worry too much. He's probably right. I'll tell you something that you probably didn't know. Heero worries just as much, if not more. And I'm not just talking about in terms of 'the mission'. He's been on edge since Duo disappeared the first time.

Heero never struck me as the 'mother hen' type, but he is. He's willing to go to truly ridiculous lengths all in the name of a 'mission'. He's trying to 'mother hen' the entire human race.

He's not the only one, either.

I don't know exactly what Trowa is thinking, he rarely opens up. But he's been wearing this rather sad frown ever since we discovered that Wufei had vanished as well. Our little group is being whittled away, one at a time.

Wufei disappeared because he has finally seen something which I knew all along. Something that Duo realized early on. Something that I think Heero and Trowa are finally beginning to be able to admit to themselves. The mission is us. We are the mission.

That sounds awfully zen.

The five of us were sent here to be soldiers, warriors. But underneath it we're people, just like the people we are fighting to protect. And like those people, we need each other to survive, to keep the nightmares away. To keep each other sane.

Perhaps the 'mad scientists' as Duo calls them, did not bargain for this little revelation. As long as we were separate, we were prepared to fight and die alone. But now that we're together, we draw strength and support from one another. We are stronger now than we were. More complete. We rely on each other's strengths when planning our missions and we cover each other's weaknesses. It would have been suicide to fight OZ as we were, separate and without support. Well, Duo and I had support. Anyway, going up against the OZ specials as individuals would have spelled our death very quickly. The OZ organization is terrifying, not because of their firepower, but because of their very autonomy within the Alliance. They are only restrained by the limits of Treize  
Kushrenada's imagination, and he strikes me as a very imaginative man.

Which leads me to another realization. Before Duo disappeared, the OZ specials were very busy. The amount of activity which they were generating reminded me of an over-turned ant hill. But since we lost our Shinigami....

They've been quiet. Very, very quiet. This means one of two things. Either they were behind Duo's vanishing act, or his disappearance and our own subsequent activity screwed up some major operation that they had in the works.

Guess which idea bothers me more.

If OZ is really pulling our strings to that extent, Duo is not the only one in imminent danger. Worse, the activity level of the Alliance military has not changed. This would indicate that there is more going on with OZ than even their so-called overlords are aware.

This could get very ugly.

The strength of the Gundam pilots lies in our anonymity and unpredictability. If OZ can predict our moves we are that much closer to the death that we have promised to embrace for the freedom of our colonies and of the Earth itself.

This is not a good thing.

We've begun to see the merit in living, and we're not so willing to recklessly spend our lives when there's even the slightest chance of salvation. Perhaps that is the danger that the scientists see. If that is indeed the problem, then they are blind. We may be less willing to throw away our lives, but that same feeling that binds us ever more closely to life and to each other fuels our determination to stop OZ and the Alliance once and for all.

It was at this point in my ruminations when a third message appeared. S wanted me to drop any efforts to find Wufei and destroy the records of our search for Duo. I was to keep all information regarding this last exchange of messages a closely guarded secret.

Feeling a bit unsettled, I decided that a cup of tea might help me think. I wandered off to the kitchen, a need for Jasmine tea calling me onward.

After my first leisurely cup of tea, I still felt unsettled, and made another. By the time I finished my second cup, I decided that I might as well begin dinner.

In hindsight, perhaps I oughtn't to have left that stack of papers resting by my laptop. I should also probably not have left that laptop sitting on the table in the living room. And I simply can't think how I could have been so careless as to forget to erase that last message which I had left blinking on the screen.

So maybe I am a manipulative little bastard (Duo's words again).

Heero and Trowa were even quieter than usual over dinner. I kept up a light, pleasant  
conversation despite their silence.

After dinner I was able to assure S that all the records had been destroyed and that the other pilots would not hear of any of this from my lips.

I serve my people. More than that, I am fighting for an eventual peace for all people. Trust is an internal part of that peace. My life depends on being able to trust my comrades and on their being able to trust in me.

Trust cannot be granted without trust given in return. I had not thought that they would attempt to replace me, but I would have thought the same about Duo or Wufei. To attempt to replace any of us....

It's not the Gundam. It's the pilot.

They are making a grave mistake. Perhaps I have made a similar error in the course of action which I have chosen, but I did it for trust and for love. I couldn't abandon Duo, but nor was I the best choice to save him.

And that admission hurts me badly. I guess Heero's 'mother hen' problem is contagious.  
I finally pinned down what it was about Duo's letter that was bothering me. I hope that Wufei is prepared for what he may find when he reaches the end of his journey.

Trowa, Heero and I will wait here, guarding each other's backs. Hopefully we will hear  
something soon. They will be watching us now, and I do not think that we will be given a chance to escape that Wufei had.

He was right, however. Writing everything down can be terribly therapeutic. I'll have to let him read this. It'd be 'unjust' to have read his own ramblings and deny him the chance to see my own.


	5. I loathe Argentina

I've been keeping this journal for a while now, but having it lying around my room in black and white was just too dangerous. I know that some of the upper classmen have been poking around in my room, and I can't let this sort of information fall into their hands. Not that they'd know what to do with it, but I'm enough of a target as it is, thanks.

Every so often I find myself wishing that I was six feet tall with muscles like the Incredible Hulk. Life would be so much easier in so many ways....

Now I just sit down with my official school laptop and type and erase, type and erase. Of course, I'm not really erasing it, just tucking it away for future reference. If I ever get out of here, there are some names that I am going to want to remember.... This journal is one of the best ideas that I have ever had. If I didn't have a way to blow off steam, I think I'd go mad.

I have class for eight hours a day. Four hours in the morning, an hour for lunch and four hours in the afternoon. I'm in the advanced classes, thanks to whatever the Prof did. It's a lot more homework than I'm used to, but that's all right. I'm more than capable of the work, I've just never bothered to keep up with it before. For the last year or so I've been bumped from school to school so often that there was really no point in trying to keep my grades up. Oh well. This is certainly more interesting than the normal run of classes.

I am currently holding my own in the top ten percent of the class. Does that give you any idea of how bored and depressed that I am? I could just scream!!!!!

I remember reading some comic book a long time ago about these kids who fought duels at this exclusive private school. It was very surreal. I'm beginning to think that they would have felt right at home here.

I'm surrounded by the rich, the powerful and the outright scary! It's not that all the kids here are uber-military social climbers, but they do comprise the vast majority.

Damn. I'm starting to sound like Quatre, even in my thoughts! Of course, I have been totally immersed in the highest strata of social society here. I have a three hour class in deportment and etiquette once a week and there's a monitored 'tea' or 'social' every other week. Oh the mad social whirl.... I hate it with a mad, screaming, pink and purple polka-dotted PASSION!!!!!

If the Prof wanted to drive me mad, he's succeeding. I'm constantly having to be on my guard, day in and day out. I can't afford for my teachers to notice me, in case they feel that they need to send a report to my 'uncle'. I can't afford to stick out too much to the other students, in case they mention me to their parents.

"That stuck up brat, you know, Zechs' nephew?"

Wouldn't that just put the cat among the canaries?

So that means no joking, no goofing off and no smart comments. In short, no me. While it's true that I've been hamming it up a bit for the guys, I usually can't go for more than a few weeks without doing something outrageous just to blow off some steam, and the need to remain anonymous is just about killing me.

I'm tempted to cause an explosion in my advanced chemistry class, just to prove that I still know how.

But it's working. The whole military school training thing, I mean. I walk like the others, I talk like the others, I dress like the others. Hell, I even look like the others. I'm just one more little automaton in a crowd of faceless children.

Hey! That sounded pretty good! I bet I could work that into one of my assignments! That's what I've been doing mostly. I stay quietly in my room and do homework. I've finished most of the stuff for the semester already. With nothing else to do, it's been easy.

I have new admiration for the OZ organization.... And if that's not scary, nothing is. Their little indoctrination program for the younger generation is nothing if not thorough. After this, I could walk into the center of any OZ recruiting center and be accepted without question. Normally, I would rejoice in this little bit of information. Now.... Let's just say that some of these kids are almost as good as we are.

Luckily, MS operation is not a part of the itinerary.

I hate this. There are no words for how much I hate this. I should be out doing something about our war. Making a difference. What am I doing instead? Cringing and hiding and writing papers on the principal exports of Argentina.

I loathe Argentina. In fact, I'm coming to hate the entire blasted planet. I really do not need to know just how many inches of rain fall in Manchuria each spring and I don't think that anyone really needs to know the mechanics of bovine digestion. How many people rely on their knowledge of the inner workings of a cow's various stomachs to get through the day?

I have a room to myself, which helps some. There's room here for another guy, but as I am apparently bound for the officer's academy, I am allowed to bunk alone.

And as for a roommate? They'll only put someone else in here if I request it, or if they run out of space elsewhere. By the unwritten social rules around here, I could really only room with another officer candidate.

I'll kill myself first. Not only is that not the type of guy I could warm up to.... Hang on. I don't want to warm up to anyone. It would be too easy to slip up. God, I'm beginning to lose my paranoia. That's bad. That's really, really bad.

Slipping up at this point will only get me executed. Although, in a certain light, that's beginning to look like the attractive option.

I'm trying not to think about the guys. About Deathscythe. I'm beginning to think that I'll never see any of them again. Life is so fucking unfair.

**

I spoke too damn soon! They've got a roommate for me. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I need someone I can relax with, just a little bit. An ally to watch my back. I desperately need someone to talk to before I go insane! But I can't risk it. And having someone else living here with me is really gonna be pushing it.

The good news is, the kid won't be here for a few days. And even better news, he's not an Ozzie of any type. He's a scholarship kid from one of the colonies. L4 or L5, I think. Then again, that could be bad news. He's gonna be even worse off than I am in the social department. That means he's gonna be in our room all the time. Or maybe I could convince him to study in the library....

Actually, there's lots of room in here. Maybe a roommate won't be so bad after all.

Of course, being the nephew and heir of the mysterious Zechs Marquise means that I have one of the best rooms. A suite! Sharing won't be too much of a hardship. There's just the one bedroom, but I've got a small study (for two) and a lounge to myself. Best of all, it's got a private bathroom. I guess it pays to be related to known psychopaths.

But back to the roommate. Maybe I can bully him into moving out? Maybe I can put the moves on him and convince him that he doesn't want to room with me and get him to request a transfer? Maybe I could just shoot myself now and get it over with?

To make matters worse, I have to hide from the girls. They follow me everywhere. This does not add to my standing with the other guys, particularly when the guys outnumber the girls by about ten to one.

I keep my door locked at all times. I would anyway, but it drives me insane to know that I can't have it open even when I'm there. It's amazing the things that you find yourself missing only when you can't have them anymore.

Life sucks.

And it could still be so much worse….


	6. I know that I'm obsessed.  Leave me be.

With Quatre's help it was easy enough to make my way home.

It seems strange now to use that word for the colony where my family resides. Home means something very different to me than it used to. It was a very painful thing to realize. When did the word home become synonymous with the faces of my fellow pilots, I wonder? Quatre could probably tell me the exact moment.

At every Alliance checkpoint all I had to do was show them the documents he had procured for me. The Winner name still counts for a lot, especially among the colonies. Even as a lowlycourier I received first class treatment for the entire length of my journey. There were one or two tense moments. I saw the woman from the OZ cadet base, Lucrezia Noin was her name. I managed to stay low, and she didn't notice me. I am sure that my face is engraved on her memory forever. It was foolish of me to let her catch me. I had underestimated her determination badly.

But in the end, she failed.

It would go very badly for me if I ever fell into her hands again.

When I finally reached my own colony, it was the work of but a few hours to place my  
requirements before the elders of my clan. They would not allow Master O to know of my presence among them, and they would aid me however they could. I kept few of the details of my self-imposed mission a secret. They deserved to know what they were getting into by aiding me.

But I didn't tell them why.

That is when Lady Fortune intervened on my behalf. Two of my cousins had each won a  
scholarship to the school that Maxwell is 'attending'. It is not truly a military academy, but I can see why Maxwell would describe it as such. It was originally created as a place where the rich and powerful could send their children to study in complete safety.

The place is nothing less than an orbiting fortress, designed to keep said children completely safe from outside influences. Only carefully chosen school staff are allowed to come and go and the shuttle ports are armed better than most military installations. No kidnapper, terrorist or murderer could hope to infiltrate the place. And the children can't get out either. Too bad they never considered the possibility of a terrorist or kidnapper who was also a child.

Too bad for them, anyway.

Over the years, it has gradually evolved into a place where high OZ officials and the heads of the Romafeller Foundation sent their most promising children, and the curriculum has been shifted in order to reflect this with a heavy emphasis on military discipline. It is, however, still an excellent school by almost any standards.

But it is still an elite school which caters to those rich enough or intelligent enough to either buy their way in, or earn it.

My elder cousin yielded his place to me easily enough. He will go to Earth, instead. He said that he has always longed to see it, and this way no one should become suspicious of his sudden ability to be both at home and at school at the same time.

So it was that, four days after my initial arrival at my family's home, I left again, my younger cousin at my side. A ship manned entirely by those allied to my family took us to the academy. While the two of us and our luggage were thoroughly searched, one of the crewmen managed to secrete my 'other' luggage in the hangar. I feel much better knowing that it is there.

It will be difficult to retrieve, but not impossible.

Eventually, and only after a great deal of fuss and background checks, we were cleared and allowed to enter the academy proper. Chang Lian is the name that my elder cousin has loaned me, and it is by that name that I will be known.

I have three roommates, all other scholarship recipients and they appear to be very serious about their studies. It promises to be a calm, relaxed atmosphere in which to work at finding Maxwell and getting us both back to where we belong.

**

This writing appears to be contagious. I have decided to follow Maxwell's example and put down the things that I cannot talk about on paper. Figuratively, at any rate.

It has been four days and I have not yet so much as laid eyes on Maxwell. I know that he is here somewhere. He is registered under his own name and by examining the class lists I know that I share at least two classes with him. Yet none of the students that inhabit my little circle have been able to point him out. It disturbs me a little. Maxwell, unobtrusive?

So where is he hiding? He is an outgoing, social creature, yet I have not seen him with any of the various clubs or athletic groups. I have not so much as glimpsed the braided idiot anywhere. They did not come and take him away while I was in transit from the Earth, did they?

And I have other problems as well. My younger cousin is rooming with some unpleasant  
aristocratic ne'er do well. He has ended up spending far more time in my room than in his own, and it has been very difficult to search for Maxwell and reassure Chen at the same time, to say nothing of my studies. Yesterday I advised him to request a change of roommates.

Today the resident advisor for our section summoned me to his office. Apparently, there are no other rooms to be had, as the last space has just been filled. Poor Chen is at his wit's end, trying to deal with sociopathic roommate. The advisor wanted to know if I would be willing to switch rooms.

It is always thus. The rich and influential have their way, while the rest of the world is forced to bow to their whims.

So this afternoon, instead of spending a highly enjoyable two hours debating the social and economic injustices (I know that I'm obsessed. Leave me be.) of early eighteenth century commerce practices, I will be trading rooms with Chen.

After everything that I have heard about Chen's roommate, I am wishing that I had managed to smuggle a gun in here. I may be needing it.

**

I've found Maxwell.

I don't know whether to be relieved or horrified.

Horrified currently has my vote.

**

After Chen and I finished switching all of our possessions, I made myself at home in the room. Or rather rooms. I was just exploring the shared study when the door to the main room of the suite opened and someone came in.

Having heard about the way he had so casually terrorized Chen, I simply leaned against the desk in the darkened study and waited for him. He knew that he had a new roommate. Knew that Chen had filed a complaint against him. He also must have known how little such a report would matter. What was one scholarship boy from the colonies when weighed against the heir of an OZ official?

Nothing. And it made me angry. He would soon discover that I was not Chen. My cousin, while immensely able, had never been exposed to the types of injustice and terror that I had seen first-hand.

My new roommate was in for a number of very nasty surprises.

He took only moments to discover where I was waiting for him.

At first glance, he was everything that Chen had described. He wore the cadet uniform with arrogant ease, the black jacket obviously tailored specifically for him. His light brown hair was cropped close to his skull and he leaned against the door frame, posing arrogantly. I could see him quite clearly, despite the darkness of the room. The lack of light hid me from him, however. The main room from which he had come was brightly lit, and it would take a few minutes for his eyes to adjust fully.

"So you're the new guy, hmmm?" his voice was light and almost teasing as he reached for the light switch. "I wonder how long you'll last."

And as the lights went on, he smirked at me. I had only a second to decide that this young man was not only very dangerous, but frighteningly familiar. Then, as my own eyes finally adjusted to the new lighting conditions, recognition struck.

"Maxwell?"

Chen had never told me his roommate's name, always referring to the other boy as 'Him'. That's right, with a capital letter.

He gaped at me for a long moment, the arrogance fading completely from his posture as realization dawned for him as well. No wonder I hadn't recognized him. Not only did he move differently and act differently....

"Maxwell.... You let them cut your hair?"


	7. I call it his uber-killjoy mode.

Oh man. I am SAVED!!!!!

It's all I can do to keep from dancing madly through this stupid place, singing fucking alleluias. Understand, though, I wasn't nearly this calm last night.

But that's between you, me and the wall, okay?

Allow me to backtrack a ways. Wu's apparently on some sort of writing kick, and I'm not gonna let his version of all of this get around without some input of my own. It wouldn't be 'just'. Heh. My roommate turned out to be a very shy, quiet kid from Wu's family. I will refrain from breaking into a rousing chorus of 'It's a Small World, After All', if only because I'm in the middle of a lecture on differential equations and I'm supposed to be paying attention.

I'm the model student after all. No wonder Wu didn't recognize me.

Anyway, Chen was a very nice kid, friendly even. We could've been friends, had the situation been different. I felt kinda bad about it, but decided that it would be best if I scared him off. So I did. I was hell on wheels, and vicious with it. I lurked, I loomed, I made suggestive comments and I was as scary as I knew how to be without actually physically threatening the poor guy.

I did really feel bad but let's face it, if it's between my life and his comfort, it's gonna be my life all the way.

He lasted longer than I probably would have. It took him three days before he actually broke down and decided to move out. Unfortunately, there was really no where for him to go. So they told me I would have another new roommate.

Oh well. I decided that I could probably keep myself amused for awhile simply by frightening any potential roommate away. Yeah, it's cruel, but I was going absolutely out of my mind. Literally. You just have no idea. Boredom is an exquisitely refined type of torture and it sucks like you wouldn't believe.

Think about being trapped on a school bus full of vicious bullies. Then imagine that you have to stay there 24/7. Then imagine that your life depends on your finishing your physics and calculus homework while this bus full of sadists bumps down the worst roads on the planet. Then imagine being bored.

I think that this is the clearest sign that my sanity is finally beginning to slip.

Soooooo, the kid moved out and his older brother moved in. From what I had heard, my new roommate could probably give the Wu-guy grumpy lessons. Marvelous. I'd seen him around a few times, mostly from a distance. He even looked a bit like Wu, but he was wearing his hair long and loose the few times that I saw him, so it was hard to tell. The Chang brothers both wear lots of reds and blacks, too - nothing at all like Wu's funerary white.

Is it any wonder that I didn't really suspect anything?

So Chang Chen moved out and Chang Wufei moved in. I didn't know that at the time, of course. I left my last class (a marvelously dull exercise in futility labeled 'social history') and headed back to my room.

And that's when I got a load of my new roommate. Chang Lian. Yeah, right. I almost believed it, right up until he said my name. It's really amazing what a simple change in hairstyle can do for a guy....

Wu may never forgive me. I grabbed him like he was my long lost love and sobbed into his shoulder. That's right. Cried like a baby. I had completely given up hope that I'd ever seen any of the guys again, and I almost passed out from sheer relief. And I don't cry.

Not in front of others, anyway.

It took the Wu man almost two hours to calm me down enough that I could give him a full report on everything that's happened over the past six months. What he told me in return was - upsetting.

Three or four months ago, OZ just sort of shut down. I don't mean that they disappeared into the woodwork, or even slowed down what they were doing. I mean that the political chicanery that they are always up to simply ceased.

With everyone in such a tiz over me pulling the world's stupidest disappearing act and Wu following my lead, several missions had been scrapped out of hand. I guess we were in the wrong place (or the right place) at the right time and some grand OZ scheme fell through, 'cuz they've been behaving themselves....and the Alliance is suing for peace.

That's not the upsetting part. The bit that I didn't like was that OZ seems to be waiting for something. Something from us, the Gundam Pilots. And I was feeling persecuted before....

And then I find out that Wu came to get me out on his own. Well, with a little help from Quatre. I had to sit down after that. My first thought on seeing that familiar face was that he hadn't received my message in time, and had been shipped off to join me in exile.

That the guys cared about me enough to come after me....

I didn't burst into tears again. I had gotten rid of most of my nervous tension with the first  
outburst. Naw, this time I worked off the stress by shrieking like - like Relena does when she's really pissed.

He shouldna risked it! Not for me. Not that I was unappreciative, but I'd been trying to get off this stupid rock for over a month! Now both of us were trapped here! And if I thought I had problems with the other students....

Remind me to tell you about the little incident in the cafeteria right after I got here.  
He just gave me that 'I can't believe you're really that stupid' look, and waited until I finally ran out of invective. It took awhile. A really long while. Then he smirked. Yeah, smirked. That particular expression he gets just before he says something really clever.

I hate it when he gets all superior. I really hate it, 'cause that's when he lectures. I call it his uber killjoy mode.

Apparently, he's got some sort of master plan. Unfortunately, we're both stuck here for another two weeks until Quatre's part of the plan can come into effect. I guess the wait is mostly because I wasn't wearing a little neon sign that said 'Duo Maxwell, Gundam Pilot - Please Rescue'.

Oh well. I've got someone to TALK to!!! Even if it is Wu-the-grumpy. I'm not alone....

And I'm currently ahead of him in the class rankings. That's gonna sting. I tell ya, six months of frustrated boredom and nothing to do but read textbooks and do research will bring anybody's grades up.

I can't wait till he finds out.


	8. Rambling seems to be contagious.

Maxwell has been missing for six months. We have turned the world inside out searching for him. Missions have gone undone, orders ignored. The fate of the colonies and indeed the Earth has been allowed to slip by the wayside while we hunted for our missing fifth.

Quatre seems to see all of this as an exercise in male bonding.

He knows that I keep a diary, I didn't bother to ask how, and he asked me to add a precis of the events which led up to the 'discovery' of our new Gundams. Strangely, only Duo's was rebuilt. The rest of us were slated to receive completely new Gundams. Except for Wufei, that is. Apparently Quatre was to be gently remonstrated with, not replaced.

Why?

Yet another question to ask our former mentors...when we catch up with them.

As I said, after Duo's initial disappearance we spent a great deal of time and effort searching for him, to no avail. This indicated that he had left under his own power.

There were several ways that it could have been done, but he covered his tracks too thoroughly for us to be able to figure out which one.

I had not thought he had the patience or the discipline to give us the slip so easily. It was  
probably someone else's plan. Something else to work on. Who would have gained by Duo's disappearance? Other than OZ, that is.

Although, from the little that we have discovered, OZ didn't _want_ Duo to disappear. And that really worries me. There is something about all this that we have missed. Something that we lack the political acumen to see. OZ is most dangerous not because of its military capabilities, but because it is run by a very intelligent man.

God help us all if he ever manages to slip the leash of the Alliance.

However, there remained the question of Deathscythe. Duo would never simply turn it over to someone else. Shinigami's relationship with his Gundam was that of a lover. That meant that whoever was aiding him either had no interest in the Gundam - which was highly unlikely, orwas someone that he trusted with it.

Trusted them with something that he valued more than his own life.

That narrowed the list of suspects quite nicely. Practically eliminated it, in fact.

But I still couldn't figure out how he could have managed to disappear so completely and for such an extended period of time. That meant that he was in trouble. To borrow Wufei's comment - Typical. And the only three suspects that I had all denied any knowledge of Duo's whereabouts. Quatre was rather peeved when I brought up his own name as one of the suspects, but I do know that Duo could and has allowed Rashid and the other members of 'the Fez Patrol' to work on his Gundam. (The Fez Patrol is Duo's nickname for Quatre's little group of sworn soldiers. Abdul is actually fond of the appellation, Rashid rather less so.)

But no possibility should be overlooked. No avenue of inquiry left unexplored.

Yes, I do watch crime shows. I also read spy novels. I'm not into escapism and like to stick with what I know.

When Wufei pulled a similar vanishing act, I became worried. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. Although in this case and in our particular circumstances, once is usually enemy action.

Reading the information that Quatre so carefully 'forgot' to hide from us on the day that we discovered Wufei's disappearance, several things became clear.

The first was that no communications from our so-called leaders could be trusted. The second was that we were now completely on our own, able only to trust each other.

Yeah, I said trust.

The third was that we had to get Duo back and liberate his Gundam. Why? Because if they succeeded in 'replacing' one of us, that would mean that anytime we did not measure up to their standards, they might replace the rest of us.

And we know too much for that replacement to be less than of the 'permanent' variety.

We are the best. It's not bragging or boasting to admit the truth, and that is the truth. There is no one, anywhere, who can do the things that we can. This new...person will never be Duo's equal, no matter how hard he tries. It's the pilot, not the Gundam, and Duo is one of the best pilots I've ever seen. He can call forth nearly impossible reserves from his Deathscythe, and has done things that I'd never believed anyone could do.

And I'm not easily impressed.

His personality, however, needs work.

Two weeks after Wufei disappeared, Doctor J sent a message stating that Professor G had  
'reluctantly' decided that he would have to replace Duo, and that this person and a new Gundam would be arriving soon.

I wanted to see that Gundam, badly. I wanted Trowa to look it over as well. If it had indeed been built from pieces of Duo's Gundam, we would be able to tell.

And then we would be able to take steps.

Don't waste your time feeling sorry for the pseudo-pilot. If he was indeed Duo's replacement, he would be able to take care of himself. If he cannot defend himself, then he has no right to be operating a Gundam. Ergo, we're all better off without him.

Cold, you say? Perhaps. But we cannot allow all the effort, all the blood and all the pain that has been expended thus far to have been for nothing. We need to remain the best, and substandard performance endangers not only the pilots of the Gundams, but the future of the human race. The stakes are just too high. We cannot afford even the smallest of errors.

Which reminds me to have a word with Duo about sneaking off like that. Doubtlessly it was under orders. Strict ones. Duo's normal interpretation of 'don't tell anyone' seems to be 'then it's all right to leave them a note'. Orders or no, that still does not excuse him.

The world was against us before, but we had our mission, we had support from the colonies and we had each other. Apparently the various Doctors and Professors have decided to change the mission, which no longer includes at least some of us. Now there is nothing left for us but each other and our determination to complete our original mission.

Quatre and I had a brief talk about that. Actually, he talked and I agreed with him. He seemed surprised. I don't see why. It's only practical to trust the people you may need to guard your back. He meant to have a talk with Trowa as well, but he's disappeared.

Perhaps I phrased that badly.

Trowa went off to look for more information. Heavyarms is still here, and I know approximately where Trowa went. I was able to tell Quatre that Trowa agreed as well. That surprised him even further. Not that Trowa agreed, but that the two of us had discussed it between ourselves.

Just because we don't talk very much doesn't mean that we don't think, or that we don't have anything to say.

I keep a diary so that I can remember the important things. I don't need to talk about them, it's enough that I remember.

Rambling seems to be contagious.

Quatre's plan was simple enough. Wufei would take Duo home to his colony for the winter vacation. (I know that they don't have seasons in space, but every school I've ever been to has had vacation times based on the traditional format.) A permission form would have to be sent to his guardian, of course. We would simply intercept it and return it, completed. An easy enough task, particularly as the OZ core military communication systems were completely open to me. I cracked their codes ages ago, and it usually only takes me a day or so to readjust when they change them.

I only wish that they were stupid enough to have similarly guarded personnel files. That school was a tougher nut to crack. I did some research and it appeared as though its reputation is well-deserved. Despite repeated attempts, Wufei is the first assassin/terrorist to actually infiltrate the place. I don't count Duo. What happened to him was more like incarceration.

The systems were as secure as humanly possible, and the computers they used for outside  
communication were in no way connected with the ones used for school records or security. Clever, that. I can't hack in to something that hasn't got any outside connections. That's why we had to get them to send us a communication. Or rather, send Zechs a communication. OZ's personnel and security files are not quite so well guarded. They need outside lines for remote access while in the field. I could hack those files, but it might take weeks, and I would need uninterrupted time. I would only get one really good chance, and I will not waste it if I am not sure that I will be able to finish the job.

I'd been reading Zechs' mail every day for a week. Despite his lurid nickname and mysterious habits, the man had very boring correspondence. Very secure correspondence as well. Nothing of interest to anyone like me ever showed up in his mailbox. A canny man, our Zechs.

Not that it mattered. I was only waiting for one specific piece of mail. Then I'd never have to hear about Lucrezia Noin's summer vacation plans ever again. If I had to hear her ask him even one more time if he was sure he couldn't come along, I was going to consider a freelance assassination. I'm sure that Zechs would thank me.

Not that I'd be doing it for him.


	9. Not in a million years.

I had previously found the experience of sharing a safe house with Maxwell to be annoying. Being forced to share immediate living quarters was far, far worse.

Probably not for the reasons which you imagine, either.

I could conceivably have handled Duo Maxwell the hyper-activity poster child, though my patience would have been strained to its uttermost limits. I might have been able to take Duo Maxwell the party animal. Rooming with Duo Maxwell the OZ Cadet Lieutenant was a nightmare.

Again, probably not for any of the reasons which would spring immediately to mind. Allow me to share with you a few days in the life of Chang Lian.

Please.

Cadet Lieutenant Maxwell was a nasty, cold-hearted sadist. Oh, he could be charming, no question there. He could be incredibly charming, smooth as glass and twice as transparent. But he was not anyone that I would want to mess with, much less voluntarily spend any amount of time alone with. He said the most innocuous things, and you could see the hidden knives only in the wounds they left on his targets. And, of course, he was my roommate.

Lovely.

He has a reputation, too. A cold-hearted flirt, leaving a trail of broken hearts strewn up and down the corridors of the school. Male and female, I have discovered. At least the men are discreet. The women.... But I'll get to that.

He avoids physical violence, unless cornered. That's only been tried twice - to my knowledge. He's hiding things from me, or trying to. Maxwell doesn't lie, which makes his 'creative omissions' a bit difficult for him to hide. I let him keep his secrets. He's been through enough.

Apparently he leveled four other boys the first time - without leaving any marks that he could get into trouble for. His word against theirs. They chose not to protest. The second time, there were six of them. He had a little more trouble, but not much. He actually dislocated someone's jaw, accidently of course. He is trying to stay out of trouble. Luckily, there were witnesses to the fact that he had been jumped. Thus, he did not get into trouble and his guardian did not have  
to be notified.

He excels in his studies....

That's the part that really bothers me. I caught myself wondering if this was all an elaborate trap. Maxwell had been done away with and I was rooming with his much more intelligent double. Not likely. He is actually in the top ten percent of our class. I suppose miracles do occasionally happen.

As it was, I spent all of the time that we were out of the room avoiding him. We had decided that after the hard time he gave Chen, seeing him warm up to his very next roommate might look a bit suspicious. Therefore, I took pains to avoid him. We only saw each other in classes, where we ignored each other coldly, or at night when we were alone our room.

It was difficult, seeing how totally alone and aloof he was. Charming, but oh so alone. We had one very public argument. We did a good acting job, apparently. I overheard two of the older Cadets talking of how impressive it was that even when we were shouting at the tops of our respective lungs, we were each very careful not to make the first move. It helps that I am in Maxwell's class on swordplay. I am one of the assistant instructors.

The first time I attended that class, they tried to shove me in with the beginners. That lasted all of about ten minutes. They then attempted to persuade me to adopt 'a more conventional fighting style'. That lasted a little longer, say fifteen minutes. By the end of the hour I was being asked to teach some of the more promising pupils.

Maxwell is not bad with a sword. He'd be better if he practiced a proper fighting style instead of that fencing garbage.

There are times when he reminds me rather unpleasantly of Treize Kushrenada.

He also assists the instructors. I must remember to ask him when and where he learned to fight with a sword. It is not something which I would have suspected of the Maxwell that I knew - thought I knew.

We will have to wait for two to three weeks before my family (thank you, Uncle Quatre) sends their request for Chen and Lian to return home for the holiday. By which time Maxwell and I will have had to make peace publicly, and we will apply for him to travel home with me.

We're still working on the 'making peace' bit. We can't think of way that would look, well, normal. Maxwell is a block of unforgiving granite. It just doesn't look right, whatever scenario we come up with.

This is going to take forever. Living with Lieutenant Maxwell is going to drive me insane. Maxwell will sometimes revert back to the boy I knew when we are alone, but very rarely. He is very unhappy, I think, but is afraid to let go of his hard - won disguise. I do not believe that he would be able to fall back into it so completely.

Not that I wouldn't rejoice to see the last of him.

It's very strange to see our rooms so neat. Not that mine weren't always that way, but any room inhabited by Maxwell in the past tended to be a bit - cluttered. He also very rarely relaxes enough to so much as put his feet up. It disturbs me to see him sitting ramrod straight at his desk, studying. The whole picture is just - unnatural. I am accustomed to seeing him sprawled out across the couch like a giant black doily, his feet either in the air or on the furniture, his braid  
coiled around his head and shoulders like a rope.

He looks very strange with that military haircut. I've caught myself staring at him more than once. He looks like a complete stranger. Not that the lack of his accustomed braid makes him look hideous, which he apparently believes. He still looks attractive. Just different. Very, very different. The uniform also creates a disturbing sort of, well, contrast. I was more used to the old Maxwell than I knew.

More fool me.

I did ask him again about his hair that first night, once he'd calmed down. "All the Cadets get a haircut," he told me. And that's all he would say. I've seen him reach for his missing braid, though. I've also seen him put up one hand to run it through the hair that's no longer there. Bastards. They could have enrolled him as a regular student. They didn't have to make him a Cadet. That haircut was cruel. And deliberate. What were they hoping to accomplish by humiliating him like that?

Other than to make him homicidal, that is.

Chen is impressed by the way that Maxwell cannot intimidate me. It is unbelievably tempting to tell him all about the original Maxwell, however, it is a temptation that I can easily resist.

But the worst part is the women.

The blasted creatures are at our door day and night. They leave love notes, cards and little dolls. They will even accost me in the corridors and press the stupid things on me to give to Maxwell. I'd dispose of the damn things, but Maxwell keeps them. He puts them up on the shelves in the main room of our suite so that everyone who stops by can see them. He says that way none of the girls feels overly encouraged or rejected. I can't stand to see them cry, he told me, looking uncomfortable.

It's enough to make a man sick.

I can't wait to get out of here. At least Maxwell isn't asking me for help with his homework the way he used to. And thankfully, I don't have to ask him for his help with mine. I don't think I would be able to handle that. The classes here are very advanced, but nothing we can't handle.

We. As in Maxwell and myself. Now that's a strange concept. I've always believed that this would be a solitary fight. Even during the few times that I have fought alongside the others, I have always felt alone. If I had ever imagined myself forming a friendship, a partnership with one of the other pilots, it would not have been Maxwell that I would have chosen.

Not in a million years.

But he's changed. A lot. He no longer wears the laughing mask, or plays the fool. Much as he would deny it, I do believe that Lieutenant Maxwell is much closer to the real Duo Maxwell than the one that I knew. Don't misunderstand me, the jester is very real. But that smiling fool is only a part of the whole. Before this episode, I thought I knew who he was.

Now I know that he is a stranger. And as long as I am rooming with Lieutenant Maxwell, I will probably never meet the real Duo. I'm beginning to think that there are more masks, more layers than I had thought.

And he's still tugging on that invisible braid. It's been almost six weeks since they cut his hair. I wonder how much longer that little mannerism will last? I almost find myself wishing that he'd talk to me about it.

I must be coming down with something.


	10. This one at least used the doorbell

I never thought that I'd be genuinely pleased to see Relena Dorlan.

That sounds a bit harsh, doesn't it? Please don't misunderstand me. She's a nice girl, and well brought up. However, her habit of chasing Heero to the ends of the Earth is a bit hard to take sometimes. Not that it matters, really. If he is willing to put up with it, it is not my place to make judgments.

But I was glad to see her. I had been wracking my brains, trying to think of a plausible excuse that I could give S for going to ground completely, when I heard her calling for Heero.

That sort of surprised me. Her usual modis operandi is to ambush him at school. Why, or rather how, had she tracked him here?

When I peered out my window, she was standing in the front yard of the little house where we were staying and shouting for Heero at the top of her lungs. I'm not sure what she has against ringing the doorbell, but decided that I'd better go out and ask her to come in. The neighbors would certainly have something to say if she kept that up for long.

Luckily, Heero wasn't home or he'd probably have shot us both. Relena for announcing his presence to the world, and me for inviting her into the house. That's all right though. If things went well, she'd be long gone by the time he got back from the store.

Things did go well, and I managed to convince her that Heero would contact her very soon. He arrived, groceries in hand, about five minutes after she left.

I let him read the message to S that I had composed before I sent it and he seemed pleased with it.

He was less pleased that I had promised Relena that he'd send her a note. I pointed out that if he corresponded with her, the chances of her showing up on our doorstep were approximately halved, and the odds of her giving advance notice of her visits increased dramatically. It wouldn't be a hardship for him to at least be civil to her. After all, she is a nice girl.

I left him hunched over his laptop composing a short note to her. See, being pleasant and reasonable works! If only we could convince Oz and the Alliance of that.

Trowa came by a few days ago and retrieved Heavyarms, saying that he had found the perfect place to hide it for a bit. I managed to convince him to stay with us for a few hours, and even got him to have dinner before he left.

That's when it happened.

This one at least used the doorbell.

I'm not going to waste much time describing him. Duo was right. I didn't like him. I didn't like him at all. Also as predicted,

Heero had him up against the wall with a gun at his head the minute he realized who the new arrival had to be. Trowa produced a pair of knives from somewhere or other and was flipping them in the air.

He's been spending too much time at the circus.

At any rate, it took me almost an hour to get the them to calm down enough to let the young man sit down. After the casual brutality of their little conversation of the best way to dispose of his body, his legs wouldn't support his own weight. Heero didn't seem to be having any trouble supporting the young man, but being held up by one hand wrapped around your trachea can't be said to be comfortable.

By the time we got him to a chair he was so terrified that he spilled his guts.

I don't understand this at all. Why try to replace Duo in the first place, much less with someone like - like this? He has an attitude, or rather, he did before Heero and Trowa got to him. He also has no determination or strength of character. It only took them an additional ten minutes to convince him to let us have Deathscythe.

They didn't even have to hurt him, which is good. I would have been very upset.

Trowa and Heero went to get it while I watched the kid. I guess he thought I was a pushover, because he tried to intimidate me. I was very polite, but firm. The knives helped.

Maybe I'm spending too much time with Trowa.

Trowa came back after a while, confirming that it was indeed Duo's beloved Deathscythe, albeit rebuilt to a fare-thee-well. Heero stayed with the Gundam for awhile, doubtless to assure himself that there were no nasty surprises secreted away in or on it. Trowa amused himself in the meantime by sharpening all the knives. There were seven or eight of them.

When Heero came back, they took the new pilot out and locked him up. I didn't ask how they made sure that he wouldn't escape. I had been sure that they would kill him. When I asked about that, albeit hesitantly, they gave me identical cold smiles.

"We're saving him for Duo," Trowa told me.

"And Wufei," Heero added.

I gulped. I do believe that killing him out of hand would have been kinder.

Duo's little trip to military school had apparently been the brainchild of our unwelcome guest. I could guess why. The little monster knew exactly which buttons to push. He couldn't have found a better way to torture Duo if he'd brought on the branding irons.

Trowa left again after that, and I haven't seen him since. He does send us a note every day or so, just so we won't begin to worry.

I miss Trowa. I miss Wufei. I miss Duo. It's not that I don't like  
Heero, or that he's poor company, but I am accustomed to being surrounded by other people. Sometimes the silence gets to me.  
I have a huge family, even though I've distanced myself from them. I have the Maguanacs, who are my family in yet another way. And I've had to leave them all behind in order to hide from S. I have the other pilots, who have been lost and scattered. Now all I have is Heero, and   
he's not exactly the warm and fuzzy type....

Anyway, I after I sent my message, we wasted no further time. We sent Trowa a message, packed up our own Gundams, and left. Trowa's things had been sent to one of our other safe houses, along with Duo and Wufei's various possessions. I kept the leather coat. Somehow, I just couldn't bring myself to leave it behind.

The Maguanacs will look after Wing and Sandrock for awhile. Heero and I are attending a public school on the far side of the globe from our last safe house. I'm wearing glasses, Heero has dyed his hair (blond, if you can believe that) and we're both answering to names other than our own.  
I told S that we'd be going completely underground for a bit. The way Relena keeps managing to track us shows that there's a problem with our supposedly secure communications. Therefore, I didn't tell him where we were going. Or why we were going there. Or for how long.

Now do you see why I was so happy to see Relena? She gave me the perfect excuse to pull a disappearing act of my own and take the others with me. S must suspect something, but as long as he can't prove it, we should be all right.

We got a message from Trowa this morning. His perfect hiding place already had a Gundam in it! He and Wufei think along the same lines sometimes. I sent a message to Rashid, and he'll go out and pick up Heavyarms for concealment. I got the feeling that Trowa was feeling more than a little peevish that Wufei managed to nick his Gundam cache for Shenlong.

He'll get over it, though. Trowa is a very mellow person in some ways. The other three are all over sharp edges. Yes, even Duo, although he tends to hide them better than either Heero or Wufei.

He's had more practice, I think.

I'm worried about Duo. While he's not the type to crack under pressure, I'm very fond of our jester. I wouldn't want to lose him, and something tells me that he's in terrible danger.

I'm worried about Wufei. His last message was a bit - intense. He hasn't sent me anything since he left his family, but I know that he was worried. While I've seen Wufei angry, pensive and sad, I don't remember ever seeing him worried.

Heero tells me that I'm going to give myself an ulcer. He may be right. For now, we'll just wait and watch. I hope that we hear something soon.


	11. Why couldn't he just have shot me out of hand?

Rooming with Wu hasn't been bad. He's been very patient, actually. He didn't spaz out at me for weeping on him, and in fact has been kind enough never to mention it again. He keeps mostly to himself, as is normal for him. But whenever I start to get restless, he'll put down his books and let me babble until I feel better.

He's an actual human being under there. Who knew?

It's easier to tell, these days. He wears his hair down all the time, I guess because that's the way the real Chang Lian wears it. He and Chen both wear the same sort of thing that Wu normally does, but in black with red dragons embroidered in it. The whole look is very cool. Makes me wish I had one. I hate this fucking uniform.

It still gives me a start if I'm listening to him and then look up and actually see him. Man, he looks _nothing_ like the Chang Wufei that I know.

It's an improvement, believe me. All that depressing white and that 'I am a rock' expression...brrrrrrr. This new Wu-guy is much more laid back.

I surprised him the day after he moved in. He was in my class on swordsmanship, and this was the first time he'd been able to attend, due to 'new student' syndrome.

You know, paperwork, orientation, meetings and all that other useless junk. You'd think they'd let us at least graduate before trying to turn us into junior bureaucrats.

Anyway, I was working out with a couple of guys who are pretty decent with an epee when he walked through the door. I didn't see him at first, and was just amusing myself by basically humiliating them.  
I don't like the epee. I didn't like the two guys I was working with either. I was therefore contenting myself with disarming them. It was sort of a personal game. See if I could force them to stop and pick up their weapons at least once every two minutes.

I was thus happily engaged when I caught a glimpse of 'Lian' out of the corner of my eye. He had a sword case in one hand and he stood and stared at me as if I'd grown another head. Heh. He's not the only one who knows how to use a sword. The Prof (May-his-soul-rot-in-hell-for-all-eternity, Amen) thought that it might be useful if I could impersonate someone from the upper classes and mingle with the OZzies. That's why he made me learn to fence. So useful for all the duels my mouth was sure to get me into. I, personally, prefer the sabre.

Wu's pretty damn good with a sword, but I knew that already. It shocked the hell out of the rest of the class, though. Man, he moves like lightning. Very flashy. I could sit and watch him for hours. Especially after the way he beat my fellow assistant instructor in a little under a minute flat. The little prick deserved it, too.

Overconfident bastard.

Now Wu's also an assistant instructor. God, please don't let me ever have to come up against him in a match. Yeah, I fence. I fence pretty damn well. But if I'm gonna go up against a guy with a sword, please, please, please just gimme a gun.

But anyway, to the point.

Despite the Wu-guy's optimistic (I never thought I'd use that word in relation to him) view of my attempted mugging last week, I knew that they weren't going to be able to just overlook the fact that I'd nearly broken that one kid's jaw, no matter how much he deserved it.

I was right. I hate that.

I got pulled out of our advanced chemistry class in order to see the headmaster. I knew that I was going to get a 'talking to', even if the incident never got reported back to 'Uncle' Zechs. Hell, I've been in trouble before. To be completely honest, I've been in trouble a lot. I know the signs, and I could pretty well predict exactly how the interview was going to go.

I managed to make several covert 'I-told-you-so' faces at 'Lian' on my way out. He ignored me.

I don't have to go over this, really. The security office has a camera in the headmaster's study and the Wu-man pinched the video for me. It's not as if there were any danger of it becoming available for general viewing, but I was definitely in danger if we'd left it with its then-owner.

I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm also stalling. Could you tell?

I traded cold, snide comments with my escort on the way to the office, and adopted a proper military attitude before we went in. Lieutenant Maxwell is a pain, but he's got the whole 'proper decorum' thing down cold. I think I'll take him out and assassinate him when this is all over. The guy gives me the willies.

Yeah, yeah. Same to you! I'm not nuts. I've just been pretending to be someone else for too damn long. I'll be glad when I can get rid of this stupid uniform. I'll be glad when they stop cutting my hair once a week....

So I marched smartly into the study, which had about seven or eight assorted Alliance officers and OZzies in it, saluted to the headmaster (as is proper for cadets. The man's a retired Alliance General fortheluvapete) and clicked my heels together.

He said something along the lines of, "Ah, Cadet Lieutenant Maxwell, you're here."

I refrained from commenting, but it was a struggle. It was perfectly damn obvious that I was here...why did he look so pleased about it?

"We have a pleasant surprise for you."

Oh shit.

"I am very pleased to see that you're doing so well, Maxwell," a voice drawled from behind me.

I was so screwed. I did not turn, as I was still at attention, but my skin actually crawled. I had a very unpleasant idea of what I would find if I was allowed to turn around.

"At ease, Cadet," the General told me as he gestured to the officers around the room. "We'll just give you two some time together, shall we?"  
And they left.

Giving in to temptation, I slowly turned around. Zechs Marquise, that fucking silver half-mask and all, was lounging on one of the couches, a file dangling from one long-fingered hand.

There's a phrase for that sort of attitude. It's called 'casual arrogance'. I can do it, but it requires the right clothing. My Cadet uniform isn't quite as bad as the regular Oz 'bellhop' get up, but it's damn close. That stupid, damned, pseudo 1776-type British officer's uniform that Zechs wears is definitely the right clothing.

Why am I being so descriptive? Well, it was the last thing I remember before my life started flashing before my eyes. The sight is pretty much burned on my retinas permanently. Zechs is one really scary SOB.

Truthfully though, it was the HUGE pistol he pulled out just as I turned around that really got my attention. My mouth, hooked straight into my instinct for survival, kicked in right about then.

"Why, Uncle Zechs? Is that any way to say hello? And here I thought you'd be happy to see me!" True enough. He would have been thrilled to have me at his mercy, had he known who I was. And I had no intention of letting him find out.

I'd like to say that he lifted one eyebrow and sneered menacingly (Yeah, I'm addicted to old movies, particularly old bad movies. Or British comedy. But I'm getting sidetracked again) but with that fucking half-mask, who could tell?

"Duo Maxwell," his voice was considering.

Oh God, please help me now. He's one of those, 'let's take it apart and see what makes it tick' bad guys. Great. Why couldn't he just have shot me out of hand?

"Sir!" I even saluted, and I know it looked good.

"Who are you?" he sounded intrigued. See my previous comment. Where the hell was Wu when I needed him!

"Duo Maxwell, sir. As you said." I was still standing at attention, eyes forward. Damn it all, he was just too far away for me to do anything about that gun! I was just going to have to stand here and take whatever he chose to dish out. The distance between us had not been chosen by accident, either. There were a lot of other chairs and couches around the room he could have been sitting in, but he was in the one furthest from where a disobedient Cadet would be forced to stand.

This guy was smart. Too smart.

"You're certainly not any nephew of mine," he commented dryly.  
"Not to my knowledge, sir." I always stick to the truth. For all I know, he could have been my uncle. Plus, if I was gonna die, I was gonna have some fun first.

"Why did you claim such a relationship, then?" he asked.

Damn. Lesse here....

"It wasn't my idea, sir. My guardian," (damn the man, he is my legal guardian) "wanted me to go to school here and felt that the easiest way would be to claim some well-known but relatively mysterious person as a relative."

All true. And very misleading. Good.

"I feel as though I know you," he began slowly.

Oh shit. He's never met me, ever. But he's seen me - or rather Deathscythe. True, it was underwater and at quite a distance, but the best soldiers have a sort of sixth sense.... please don't let him have it. Or if he does, let it be going haywire. I remained silent. Better to say nothing than give him any ideas.

"Tell me, you must have another reason for being here. What is it?" He was watching me closely, I think.

God, I hate that mask. Maybe that's why he wears it.

"It's punishment," I told him frankly. "Who'd want to go to military school?"

That foxed him. He stared at me for a long moment and then glanced down at the file, still held in his other hand. He's good, I'll give him that. He merely glanced, a quick flicker of half-seen eyes. He wasn't going to look away from me. Damn it all.

"Your grades are impressive," he began.

"The highest of any Cadet at the school, sir," I assured him. They were. And as of last week, Wu had pulled ahead of me by a percentage point. I was determined to pass him and - Okay, my mind is wandering. Back to the issue at hand.

Zechs ignored my interruption. "Your overall performance with the Cadets is exceptional.'

"Thank you, sir!" What, did you think they were calling me Lieutenant for my good looks, charm and personality? The Cadets aren't allowed rank, but the most outstanding student from every year category is given the title Lieutenant.

Betcha didn't think I had it in me, didja?

"And you are one of those five Gundam pilots," he continued.

I didn't say anything. He gently waved the file at me, smiling. "Do you pilot a Gundam, young man?"

"No," a flat answer.

That surprised him. He had been so sure he knew who I was. But I wasn't a Gundam pilot anymore.

"But you used to be," he finished.

Oh shit. I've been fed to the wolves. On purpose. I bit my lip, but did not answer. I had no words to give him, anyway.

"Lenient, aren't they? You screwed up and this is punishment?" I swear he raised an eyebrow under that mask as he waved the hand holding the file at the opulent room. The gun never wavered.

I let my own mask slip. Shinigami is a scary person, much scarier than Lieutenant Maxwell. I didn't have time for these stupid games. If he wasn't going to kill me, I had homework to do. I wasn't about to let Wu get any further ahead! Yeah, I did actually think that. Maybe I need to see the school psych.

Anyway, I lost the fucking military bearing and relaxed. I narrowed my eyes at him and let him get a look at the real Duo Maxwell. "You are an idiot!" I snarled. "I was left here on purpose!"

He blinked. I swear.

"They left me here with your name attached to me like a fucking tag on a Christmas present. You were meant to find me!"

"Why?" he asked. His voice was surprised.

"So you'd kill me, presumably," I gave him my nastiest smile. "So if you don't mind, you can either shoot me, or you can let me get back to class."

He actually appeared to consider that.

"I'm afraid, young Maxwell," JUST like the evil villain in an old movie. "That you're going to have to come with me."

That was an interesting, if clichéd line.

"Why?"

"There's a great deal that you could tell us about those Gundams, now that you've been cast adrift." He smirked at me.

"I'm not going to tell you anything."

That surprised him. "You just told me that you'd been hung out to dry?"

I shrugged. It wasn't anywhere near that simple, but I wasn't going to tell him that. There was no way that I'd tell them anything that might hurt the others, no matter how badly the Prof et al had screwed me over. C'mon Wu. I've been gone way longer than a simple lecture could possible call for. Come looking. Please!

The door to the room swung open as if cued. I couldn't help turning to see, hoping that by some miracle, Wu had gotten my distress signal.

No such luck. It was the headmaster avec flunkies. Zechs' gun disappeared. He obviously didn't want them finding out about his new acquisition - one pissed off ex-Gundam pilot.

I didn't want them finding out either. They wouldn't shoot me out of hand either, but the Alliance was into torture. I knew this because they frequently broadcast exactly what they planned to do to us once they caught us. That meant I was stuck with Zechs, at least for the nonce. It could have been worse. The OZzies would treat me fairly well. At least until they discovered that I really wasn't going to tell them anything.

Not a good train of thought to be following. Focus, Maxwell. Focus.

My stomach began to cramp up as I heard Zechs agree to take that tour of the school now, and that I would be accompanying him. Not just on the tour of the school, but on the rest of his tour of the colonies and then to return with him to OZ headquarters on Earth.

And I couldn't protest. I couldn't say anything. I was sooooo screwed. He turned to me with a smile. "Come along, Maxwell."

"Yes, 'Uncle'."


	12. Quatre always gets his way in the end.

Quatre always gets his way, in the end. Even Yuy and Chang will eventually give in, if only to keep him from looking at them like that. He does a very good imitation of an abused puppy.

I spent a great deal of time at one of the larger Alliance bases while the others searched for Maxwell. I spent almost all of my time there once Chang also went missing.

There was a lot going on. The Alliance was trying to stop the war while still retaining power. That is, they wanted the colonies to accept a list of mostly worthless gestures in return for knuckling under. There is really no practical way for them to maintain peace and their stranglehold at the same time. The abuses of power were too many and they have gone on for too long. Some things can never be forgotten. You may want to let go of the pain and move on, but the memory lingers.

Their talk of peace sounds beautiful and grand, but they are building this grand structure on a foundation of broken promises, tyranny and betrayal. It will not stand.

But still, the Alliance leaders struggle for peace with the colonies.

It's not working. True, no one has tried to send us on any missions of late. Everyone is waiting to see if or when, the negotiations will fail. Well, almost everyone.

OZ is up to something. Everywhere I went, every file I read, every soldier that I talked to.... Something was very wrong. But I could not discover what it was.

So I arranged to be transferred to OZ headquarters. The answers were there. I just had to find them.

Then I took leave and went back to the safe house to pick up my things. I'm glad that I did. I'm also grateful that Quatre asked me to stay for dinner, because the child that Maxwell warned us about showed up while I was there. I'm not going to dignify him with the title of 'pilot'.

A Gundam pilot is someone who has given themselves to a mission, to an ideal. We fight for our people, our colonies. We fight for a future and we fight for others. Each of us has given up many things to be where we are - or had them taken away. This child seemed to think it was some strange game by which accumulating 'glory' in battle determined a winner.

It's not a game, it's an acceptance. We have each already chosen to die.

Do you think that sounds horrible? Look at it a bit more logically. Of the five of us, only two have outside ties. Of those two, one would give his life in a heartbeat if he thought good would come of it. The other has already given himself up for dead.

He didn't strike you as the obsessive type? He's always been more driven than the rest of us. Look a little harder. Chang has an actual death wish.

True, it's not as noticeable or as strong as it used to be, but I catch myself thinking that he's only living for his goal. Once he reaches that goal, he will no longer have any reason to live. Looking at the situation from another angle, this whole problem with Maxwell might actually do him some good.

Back to the point.

We chose to do this, to come to Earth to fight and to die. When you are in control of a Gundam, no one can force you to do anything that you don't want to. Oh, they can try, and with proper programming, they might succeed. But we choose whether or not to accept the missions. We choose whether or not to follow the set parameters. We choose whether or not to die.

Yes, we obey orders. But in the end, it is because we decide to - because we want to. The odds against our surviving this conflict are astronomically high, even now that it looks like there might actually be peace. Before? To accept this task, to become the pilot of a Gundam, was to accept the fact that you would die. We may not talk about it, but we all know it.

But we've changed, too. We're not children. Some of us never were and that sets us apart. Adults can't accept us. The concept of a child that commits cold-blooded murder, no matter the cause, upsets them. We can't really relate to people our own physical age, either. We all wear masks; the jester, the lone wolf, the soldier, the nameless one and the guide.

The five of us are alone.

But we have each other. We each have four other people who can understand, at least a little, who and what we are. Four other people who can accept the blood and the death and the loss. Four other people who can see, at least a little, behind those masks. Four other people that we can trust, unconditionally.

And our mission goes on. I am still ready to die.

But I no longer look forward to it.

When people ask me, I still say that I don't have a name. But it's not true. They call me Trowa, and they have made it my name. A name that I am pleased to answer to, because they care. They care about the mission, they care about each other and they care about me.

It's an interesting feeling, and not one I'm familiar with.

We are who we are and no one else could hope to do the things that we do every single day. Each of us compliments some part of the others, and we make up one whole between us. We are not expendable. We are not replaceable. Maxwell is Maxwell, and no one else could hope to be Shinigami.

Especially not this child. The thought revolts me. We'll let Maxwell deal with him. If we ever manage to pry him off of Deathscythe, that is.   
They did a beautiful job of rebuilding it. Which makes me wonder.

If they actually made a new Gundam for Quatre (and presumably the rest of us), why rebuild Deathscythe? And why try to replace both Maxwell and Chang? If they were to replace two, I would have thought it would be Maxwell and Quatre or Chang and Yuy. Or Yuy and me.

But to replace a pair that are so dramatically opposite? Where is the logic in that?

As I waited for my transfer to go through, I looked for a place to conceal Heavyarms. I didn't want to leave it with the circus. Not only could it have been discovered, its mere presence could bring danger down on them. I could easily have left it with Rashid, but it seemed foolish to keep the three remaining Gundams in the same spot. That way if one were found, all three would be lost.

I eventually found the perfect place, a gigantic waterfall which fell down into a deep, rock walled pool. The pool extended under the waterfall a way, and Heavyarms would be protected from detection on all sides. Someone would have to do as I did, sliding under the waterfall itself, in order to find it.

That's how I found Shenlong. It wasn't until I was actually figuring out how deep the pool was in order to make sure that Heavyarms would fit, that I realized something was already down there. Chang can be a bit too clever for his own good, I think.

I had to find somewhere else to conceal my Gundam. It eventually ended up with Rashid and the 'Fez Patrol'.

Maxwell's speech patterns can be contagious.

Once I reached OZ headquarters, I discovered several unpleasant and alarming things.

The first was that, but for Maxwell's disappearance, we might have succeeded in escalating the war and providing the spark for a bloody military takeover of the Earth by OZ.

Some people never clean out their mail caches.

A stupid thing to do, even if you do have a supposedly 'secure' terminal. If that mission had not been scrapped due to Deathscythe being unavailable.... The consequences would have shaken the entire human race.  
The second thing I discovered was that someone was attempting to set us up. I realize that the first findings made that pretty obvious, but the plans for using us against the Alliance and against the colonies themselves were continuing. This was borne out by the fact that someone was using Relena's ability to track Yuy anywhere in the world in order to keep tabs on us.

Yuy is going to have to do something fairly permanent about that girl if she will not reveal how she is tracking us, because the enemy is using that against us. Luckily, it appears as though we have lost both Relena and our enemy. At least temporarily.

The last thing that I discovered sent me to join Yuy and Quatre as fast as I could. The plotting against the Alliance by OZ is supported by the Romafeller foundation. Kushrenada is up to his strange eyebrows in some very nasty power politics and he appears to be not only holding his own, but gaining significant ground.

Something funny is going on in the OZ upper echelons and Kushrenada is just too dangerous. If he manages to slip the leash of the Alliance, our lives are all going to become much, much more difficult. Kushrenada not only sees the danger that the Gundams represent, he understands it.

Brute strength and superior firepower will not allow us to prevail over a foe that can anticipate our every move.

Zechs was scheduled to arrive at Maxwell's school this morning.

Our enemy knew where Duo was. That argues for their informant being one of us. I can't believe it. I won't believe it.

When I returned to the others, Yuy went over the information and informed me that someone had intercepted one of Maxwell's letters to Chang. So it wasn't one of us.

But then, who?


	13. This was all like a very bad dream.

Maxwell never came back to our chemistry class. I spent the remaining hour staring off into space, worrying. I didn't manage to take a single note. He had been gone for too long.

When the lecture was over, I hurried back to our room.

Maxwell wasn't there. Neither were the books he had taken away from class with him. This was bad.

I made my way hastily to the headmaster's office, just in time to see Zechs Merquise coming out, one arm wrapped firmly around Maxwell's shoulders. The man was wearing both a sword and a sidearm and they were accompanied by several OZ soldiers and the Headmaster.

This was beyond bad.

Keeping my expression neutral, I continued down the hall, stepping aside as the rest of the group came out of the office. "We'll start with the dining hall, shall we?" the Headmaster was saying.

I showed the proper degree of polite interest as the group strolled past. Maxwell nodded curtly, no sense trying to pretend he didn't recognize his own roommate. Zechs turned to look at me. And then looked again.

And I was originally pleased upon learning that there was no set school uniform for non-cadets.... If there is one thing Lian's outfits do, it is attract the eye. I have no idea why our family insists on being so eye-catching when away from home. The stark black and warm crimsons combined with the style of the clothing and the intricate designs practically scream 'here I am, look at me'.

Zechs would remember me. The outfit guaranteed that.

I continued down the hallway to the Communications room. They keep all the computers that are used for mail and messages here. Any information that needs to leave this room to be taken further into the school must be printed out and transported as hard copy. No disks, no file transfers, no nothing. Apparently, it is not just hackers that they fear, but tailor-made viruses.

Sensible. A tad paranoid, perhaps, but the reasoning is sound. I'd like to find a way to do it, simply to prove that I could.

I'm spending far too much time with Maxwell.

I sent a message to Lian's parents. The wording chosen carefully so that Quatre would realize that we were in trouble when he intercepted the message.

Hopefully, Heero or Quatre was monitoring the account closely. Chen needed to get out of here before something happened that would reveal my identity. As my little 'brother' he would be assumed to know everything that I was up to. And rightly so. Chen did know most of what I was up to. It would not have been right to involve any member of my family without informing them of the risks.

I passed the latest class rankings list on my way to my next objective. Maxwell and I were now even, ranked together in the top five percent of our class. He does it on purpose, I swear.

Now for the difficult part.

It wasn't a lot of fun, but I managed to get the tapes of Maxwell's encounter with Zechs from the security office. All I had to do was drug the coffee and wait. The entire security staff drinks the evil stuff, so that wasn't as difficult as it might have been. Figuring out how the antiquated surveillance systems work took a little longer, particularly because the system in the Headmaster's office wasn't hooked to a monitor (to preserve confidentiality, I suppose) and I had to take four or five tapes to be sure I had the right one.

Time was running out.

An official tour of every inch of the station took eight hours. The VIP visitors guided tour usually took four. Maxwell would do his best to delay the group, so I had probably another three hours to work with.

I made my way to Chen's room and found him already packing. A family 'emergency' had arisen which apparently demanded our presence at home. Heero must really have been keeping an eye out for my message. I told Chen that I'd meet him in the shuttle bay and headed back to my own room. I had approximately 15 minutes to find and delete all the records on Cadet Lt. Duo Maxwell. Zechs might already have a hard copy, but if I could reduce the amount of information floating around, so much the better.

I may not be a computer hacker of the level that Heero is, but I cleared the files in less than ten minutes. I spent the remaining five throwing some clothes and a few books in my bag. I then turned to Maxwell's side of the room and began searching for anything that he wouldn't want left behind.

I should have known better. It's not like Professor G would let him bring anything personal with him. It wasn't until I checked under his pillow that I found what I was subconsciously looking for; a coiled three foot length of chestnut brown braid.

This was all like a very bad dream.

I left my laptop, I'd been very careful not to keep anything important or revealing on it. However, I scooped up Maxwell's in its place. He could have almost anything on that computer, and I didn't have time to mess around looking for it.

I shoved the braid into my bag and started for the shuttle bay. I caught up with Chen along the way and the two of us hurried down the corridor.

"What are you going to do?" Chen whispered. "Security in the shuttle bay is a nightmare!"

I didn't say anything, merely twisted my right hand to show him the small remote detonator that I had in my sleeve.

"You're going to cause an explosion in the shuttle bay!" Chen was shocked. Like all colony born, he has an almost instinctive awareness of that which will bring danger to those small, fragile orbiting worlds that we live in.

"I haven't the time for a more complicated plan," I hissed. "I know what I'm doing, Chen. Nobody will die, and the school will not lose atmosphere." Well, not a lot, anyway. After all, it was the shuttle bay. It was designed to lose atmosphere.

"Why?" Chen asked, finally voicing the question he had been dying to ask ever since I arrived at my family's home. It was a question that I had refused to answer for the elders, and he knew it.

"To rescue someone," I told him, going faster now. Time was still ticking away, and I was becoming more and more worried - and distracted. This was not good. I had to concentrate on one thing at a time. Getting Chen away was priority one. But I kept thinking of Maxwell, and the look in his eyes when he had seen me in the corridor.

Fear had been replaced suddenly by hope.

"What? Who?" Chen was hard pressed to keep up with me. He had more baggage. I suppose I've become used to only packing that which I need to survive. I can always buy or steal more.

"A friend," I told him, pressing on.

There was a thump from behind me and I stopped to see Chen, his luggage on the floor at his feet, staring at me as if I'd just grown another head. "A, a friend?" he stammered.

I glared at him. "I do have them," I pointed out coldly. In some ways, Chen was as dangerous as I. In others, he was the sheltered child that I had been in what feels like a thousand years ago.

"But, but here? You haven't so much as spoken to anyone, really." Chen began gathering his bags. I helped him. The need to keep moving was beginning to gnaw at me.

"We don't have time for this, Chen!" I told him. "I came to rescue someone who was sent here against their will. You don't need to know who it is. In fact, you're better off not knowing."

"It's Him," Chen breathed.

I flinched. Had my acting job been that bad? I then realized that Chen was staring over my shoulder, transfixed.

I turned, already knowing what I would see.

Zechs still had one arm slung carelessly over Maxwell's shoulder. They and a small escort of bellhops - Maxwell's speech patterns appear to be catching - were heading toward our room. We had cut it far, far too close. One of the OZ soldiers was carrying Maxwell's books for him - an interesting sight.

Maxwell shook off his 'Uncle' and gave us a very cold look. "Where the hell are you going, Chang?" he asked me.

"Home," the answer was short and bitter. A choral effort, as Chen's voice blended with mine.

"Chickening out?" he taunted. I could see the hope still flickering faintly in the back of his eyes. I gave him my most forbidding frown, and he almost smiled.

Chen dropped his luggage again and drew himself back into a fighting posture. I flung out one hand, blocking his path to the older boy. "Now is not the time, Chen. We have a shuttle to catch."

Zechs had watched the whole thing without revealing anything other than a slight smirk. As I spoke, he reached out and put one hand on Maxwell's shoulder. It was a well-hidden reaction, but I saw Maxwell flinch. I felt my fists clenching. Helpless anger shot through my system.

Zechs noticed. Don't ask me how. I could practically see the information being filed away. He's amazingly expressive for someone who runs around with half his face concealed.

Maxwell shrugged and calmly proceeded down the corridor, Zechs and escort in tow. We waited until they were out of sight. My fingernails had left cuts in the palms of my hands. Chen stared at me as I took one of those clenched hands and slammed it into the corridor wall.

Zechs was not going to take Maxwell back to Earth and turn him over to OZ. It was not going to happen. OZ would use him for everything they could, and then dispose of him. A rather more permanent disposal than that attempted by the Professor.

"I will not wear white for Duo Maxwell," I snarled, forgetting my audience.

Chen's shocked gasp drew me back to myself. I must have given him the impression that I was deranged. I am not the emotional type. I do not give myself over to rage. Not where anyone will witness it, at any rate. And that last comment could have been taken in any number of ways.

"Come on," I snarled. "They'll be back in just a few minutes and we have to get out of here."

Chen shut up and soldiered.

**

Maxwell has a great many files on this laptop and I'm very glad that I brought it along. However, it does not make for comfortable reading. I shouldn't really be reading it at all, but   
I'm trying very hard not to think about the revelations which followed that little outburst in the hallway. Unfortunately, the subject matter of Maxwell's ramblings is not helping me at all.

The small explosion in the shuttle bay bought enough confusion that Chen was able to convince the crew to take off right away. They never noticed that there were supposed to be two of us.  
The OZ guards on Zechs' shuttle never even saw me sneak aboard. They were too busy waving fire extinguishers with the rest of them. I even had time to visit my cache of illegal 'supplies', thankfully.

Oz shuttles are all basically the same, although this one was much nicer than any of the others I had been in. It was the work of moments to find the proper maintenance panel and slide inside, luggage and all. It would have been a tight fit for a grown man.

I have lived in worse.

This particular access hatch would only be opened if there were a problem. As I had access to all the wiring for the inboard lights and communications systems, I would make sure that there were no problems. A secure hiding place, and one I've used before. I had a small supply of rations, and could hide here quite easily for several weeks. It helped that there was a head across the hall.

Sometimes I believe that the OZ system designers make it easier for people like me on purpose. You'd think that they'd design their equipment to be a bit less accessible. I can't even count the number of different ways that I know to hijack an assault shuttle or a Mobile Suit. Of course, there are only four other people that I know of with such skills, so perhaps it's not so surprising that it's not high on their list of priorities.

Maxwell and Zechs arrived shortly after I had settled in. There was a several hour delay while everyone calmed down, and then they were allowed to board.

Maxwell is locked up in a suite. I've never seen such an opulent, luxurious, totally sinful, paid-for-with-the-blood-of-others....

I'm calm. Really.

We have about a three day trip before our next stop and another week before we reach Earth. I don't dare go see Maxwell. Zechs is keeping a very close eye on him. Maxwell himself is being very cold and nasty. Not a clever quip or cheerful grin to be seen.

Yes, I am perfectly capable of hooking up a portable monitor to the cables of a state of the art, military inner-shuttle security system. Now all I can do is sit and wait and read everything that Maxwell has written in his little electronic diary for the past few months.

It's not polite, or a thing that an honorable person would do, but I am slowly going out of my mind. If I don't find something else to think about, fast, I am going to begin to do some rambling of my own.

**

I'm feeling very bad for Maxwell. I had realized that he had been put through the emotional wringer, but I never realized just what this had done to him. Professor G couldn't have done anything more calculated to crush his spirit if he'd thought about it for years.

I have plans for G. He had better hope that Heero catches up to him first. This whole exercise is completely unforgivable.

**

It's been two days, and I've read everything in Maxwell's files. Twice. I caught myself correcting his grammar and decided that I had to find something else to do.

Reading back over this particular file, I suppose that I ought to explain something that happened the day after I moved in with Maxwell. I feel that I owe it to him to explain. After all, it's one of the very few things that he did not record in his electronic diary - and I appreciate that.

I had already been unpacked when Maxwell came back to the room on that first night. Neither of us were exactly in the mood to socialize after our somewhat stormy reunion, and we went straight to sleep. We had no time to talk the following morning before class, either.

When I arrived back at our room that evening, Maxwell was going through my closet.

"What are you...?" I began, offended.

"Sorry, Wu-man," He turned to me, a sad look in his eyes. His new appearance still gave me a shock, and I forced myself to swallow my demand that he leave my things alone.

"What do you need?" I asked instead.

"I was hoping you'd have something I could wear," he told me. "Just around the room. I hate this fucking uniform, hate it with a red hot passion. I don't want to wear it a second longer than I have to."

They hadn't even let him bring any normal clothing? I looked him up and down. We were the same size, more or less. What harm could it do? "Go ahead," I told him.

While his uniform must have been grating on Maxwell's nerves, Lian's wardrobe did not offer much in the way of variety either. Of course, Maxwell has a thing for black, so it's possible that he didn't care.

He finally found an outfit (black with red dragons, yes) that he liked, and departed for a bath. I retreated to the study and began work on a paper for my class on ancient legends and mythology.

More dragons. This particular class had several texts on ancient Chinese legends which made me slightly nostalgic and more than a little homesick, which surprised me. I've never been homesick.

Maxwell showed up after his bath and also turned to studying. I had thought he had looked different before.... He looked very natural in Lian's clothing, though another step removed from the Maxwell that I thought I knew. It was disturbing.

It wasn't until I finished my studies for the night and closed my books that he spoke, and I realized that he had been waiting for me to complete my work.

"Wufei," he began slowly, "there wasn't any white in your closet."

I froze. I had never considered that the other pilots might know the significance of my white clothing. Very few people adhere to the older traditions, and I did not think that anyone outside of my own colony or a few very isolated places on the Earth itself still practiced that particular custom.

How did he know? When had he noticed? Why was he bringing it up now? There was a long silence. I finally looked over at him, only to discover that he was simply waiting for a response. If I wasn't going to answer, he wasn't going to press the issue.

I sometimes forget that we all have our secrets. I don't know what possessed Maxwell to choose this moment to ask about mine, but he obviously knew what it would cost me to answer.

I couldn't tell him. I'm not even sure why. But I felt that I had to say something. "There is no reason for Chang Lian to wear such clothing," I whispered.

Maxwell frowned. Damn. He did know why I wore white, then. Generally, if not specifically. I resolved to find out how and why later.

"I... do not wear white anymore," I added softly, and left the room.

He didn't ask again.

I was glad. I didn't want to talk about it, didn't know how to talk about it.

But here, alone and hidden in an enemy shuttle, it seems to be all that I can think about. Writing it down might help. After all, this bad habit of writing things down was started for just such an occasion.

I wear white to signify that I am in mourning. I had a wife, once. She died. The story is longer and more complicated than that, but you don't really need to know the rest.

When I returned to my family and prepared to assume my disguise I did a great deal of thinking. Some of the people I met were surprised that I still wore the white. Some thought it was only proper. A few wondered that I'd ever put it on to begin with.

I spent an entire day trying to decide what to do. I had worn other colors, other disguises, but I had always worn the white when I could. But this time was different.

This school was an exclusive academy, catering to all five colonies and the Earth. The instructors were carefully tutored in the cultural differences of the various students in order to avoid conflict. After all, when you have hundreds of nervous, hormonal teenagers all trapped in the same enclosed system for months at a time, personal problems are inevitable.

Someone from my colony, my family, would not be able to wear white without arousing comment in a closed community like the school. In order for me to wear white as Chang Lian, there would have to be something in his personal history to account for it. Lian had been accepted at the school before I ever arrived with my 'brilliant' plan. Thus, they had all his of his records and there was no such reason listed in them anywhere.

I spent a very long time agonizing over this. A large part of it was guilt. There was a small voice deep inside telling me that if I finally shed the outward signs of mourning then the guilt and the inward pain would be more easily ignored.

That felt too much like betrayal. The white was the only remaining sign in my transient life that she ever existed.... (I do not count the Gundam. That is a purely personal matter, and one which I do not care to go into.)

In the end, I put the clothing away. I folded it up carefully and placed it in a box, pushing it far under the bed that I had last used many years ago. I said the traditional prayers, but my heart wasn't in it. I was done with the white. I was not yet finished with the grief or the guilt, but I would no longer wear it like a banner.

What happened to her, to us, defined the person that I am now. But that person is not the person that I used to be, nor is he the person that I will grow to be. But he will always be with me. By formally casting off the white, I had taken the first step toward the person that I would become.

If I live.

I am still willing to die for my people, for my friends, for my family and for those that I love.

But I will no longer embrace my death as that which should happen. That would be as bad as taking Heero's gun and shooting myself. It would accomplish nothing.

Again, there was more to it than that, but you don't really need to know. When I discarded my formal mourning a great many things changed for me. This is why so much importance is placed on symbols and rituals. They are merely an outward sign of an inward change. A change that I thought would never come. A change that I had been denying myself by burying my feelings deep beneath the surface, trying to atone for something not truly my fault in a desperate act of penance.

When had I learned to feel again? Chen was right, although it is a bitter thing to admit. I never really had friends, just people that I knew. Now I had friends. I had a home. I had family - a family that understood me. Understood me far better than I had realized.

And I had Maxwell. He understood me and he had ever let on. He had been genuinely pleased to see me, and not just because I was hoping to rescue him. He had taken the trouble to ask about what was a life-altering change for me, even if I hadn't wanted to discuss it.

And he was trusting me with his life.

I will not wear white for Duo Maxwell. It will not come to that.

I swear it.


	14. Where he managed to hide them in that uniform is beyond me.

"The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglie," I said, staring at the unwelcome message on my computer screen.

Heero gave me a strange look. I collect them. Really! I save them up and think about them when things get depressing.

I think the stress is getting to me.

"Wufei's in trouble," I told him. Heero was up and leaning over my shoulder in an instant, abandoning his own laptop to see what I'd found.

"We need to get them out," he said, gently shoving me out of the way. His fingers danced across the keyboard for a moment. "Death in the family?"

I shook my head. "Just label it family emergency, two or three lines, very short. The administration will make sure that the Chang brothers get the information right away. I made sure Wufei had enough money. He can buy a shuttle if he needs to."

"Won't that make someone suspicious?"

I shook my head again. "Wufei's family has plenty of money, and in an emergency, he'd be expected to use it."

"Done then."

It wasn't until that evening when Trowa arrived that we found out what that emergency had been.

"Zechs Merquise?" I sat down heavily. This meant trouble. "What was he doing out there?"

Trowa took off his uniform jacket and hung it up before turning to face us. "He was looking for one of us."

There was a very long silence.

"Let me see the files," Heero demanded. Trowa passed over a small selection of discs and Heero went to work. There were no comments while we waited.

"It wasn't one of us," Heero finally decided. "They don't know about Wufei. It wasn't the doctors, either. Oz doesn't know which pilot Duo is."

"Then who?" I asked. What sort of game was going on around us, and why couldn't we see it?

"The same person who is using Relena Dorlan to track our every move," Trowa said softly, offering another disc to Heero.

Heero's lips thinned as he ran through the files. "There's more," he turned to Trowa and held out a hand. With a very slight nod, our green-eyed friend came up with a third stack of discs.

Where he managed to hide them in that uniform is beyond me!

"Romafeller," Heero breathed, after a few moments. "Quatre, what do you know about them?"

"Not as much as I'd like," I admitted. "They are a very quiet sort of group, unless you're a member. They advocate a return to the old ways. The divine right of rule, etc. I do believe that Treize Kushrenada is a member."

"Are you suggesting that we ask him?"

People say that Trowa doesn't have a sense of humor. They're wrong. I sighed. "Well, if we thought he'd give us a straight answer it would be worth a shot."

"We can worry about it later," Heero said, snapping his laptop closed. "First we have to do something about Maxwell and Wufei."

"What did you have in mind?" Trowa sank down on the couch. "We don't even know what happened at the school."

"Ah, but we do!" I was quite sure. "Duo's been captured by Zechs."

They stared at me as if I'd grown another head. I get that a lot. It's hard to explain these flashes, but I knew that Duo was in a lot more trouble than he had been twelve hours ago. Wufei was still all right, however.

"It's true," I persisted. "We should leave now. Wufei will let us know where they've taken Duo. We can pick up the message from anywhere, so we might as well simply leave Earth and head for the school. That way we should get a head start!"

"And how will we get him away from that blonde lunatic?" Heero wanted to know. "If that is indeed where he is?"

"Trying to rescue a prisoner from an armed shuttle isn't an easy task," Trowa cautioned.

"Particularly one with Zechs in command," Heero confirmed grimly. "The man knows what he's about."

"We can rely on Wufei!" I told them.

They gave me another round of funny looks. I smothered a grin and memorized the expressions.

What? You thought I was kidding when I said I collected them?

"Look, let's just get going. We can think of something along the way. Besides, if we stay here any longer, Relena will show up again and whoever is tracking us will know where we are. And that there are only three of us."

They were both on their way out of the room before I finished the last sentence.

"Remind me to have a chat with Relena when we return," Heero's voice floated back down the hallway.

I grinned. Sometimes you had to work for it, sometimes it fell into your lap. I hurried to pack my own belongings. Soon we'd be back in space.

Heero and Trowa could steal us transports at the nearest OZ base and I would see what I could find out about the Romafeller foundation. And we would wait to hear from Wufei.

For some reason, I found myself worrying about Wufei. But that was silly, wasn't it? He had found time to send us that message, which implied that he had received at least some warning. I should be worried about Duo, shouldn't I?

But for some reason, it was Wufei that occupied my thoughts as I ran out of the house, following Trowa and Heero on our newest mission.


	15. There are times when I can cautiously admire Zechs.

The first three days of our unplanned excursion weren't too bad. Not counting the cramped quarters, lack of occupation and the rations.

Maxwell caught up on his reading and did all his homework for the next month and a half. Apparently Zechs played the 'Concerned Uncle' bit for all it was worth and brought along all of the classwork that Maxwell would supposedly be missing. Which means that he's theoretically ahead of me again.

At this point, I doubt that either of us is really worried about who has the better class standings. It's not as though we would willingly go back to that orbiting prison. Well, not unless I can sell Maxwell on that computer virus idea.

Zechs spent a lot of time in that suite doing paperwork of his own, but always a good distance away from Maxwell. Maxwell himself was chained to the desk that he worked at by one ankle whenever Zechs was present. They were being cautious. Too cautious. Not even I would believe that Maxwell could take over an armed enemy shuttle on his own. Well, not from a suite where he was chained by the ankle and under heavy surveillance, but it made me a bit nervous.

Nervous, that's right.

Zechs was treating a fifteen year old as dangerous enough to do something that an experienced adult would have trouble with. And in this case, rightly so.

But how did he know?

Even given that Zechs knows that Duo is a Gundam Pilot, how would the Lightning Count know Duo's other, more interesting capabilities? We had all been very careful. The only ones who had even been seen were Yuy and myself. We took our orders to remain concealed very carefully.

So how did he know?

And Maxwell wasn't doing any talking, either. He answered when spoken to, sometimes. The rest of the time he was silent. That worries me. Maxwell needs an outlet of some kind, or he'll self-destruct. And I don't mean with explosives.

I'll let the others worry about the how and the why of it all. I'll worry about Maxwell.

Someone has to.

As I said, the first three days weren't so bad.

When we reached L4, the next stop on Zechs' tour, Maxwell was locked up in his cabin with his homework and a stack of novels and Zechs took almost everyone else off the ship with him. He did not neglect to mention to Maxwell that if the shuttle took off without him, there were orders to shoot it down.

Oh well. I knew it wasn't going to be that easy. There were only five OZ soldiers left on the ship. With a little luck and a lot of skill, I should be able to loop the video feed from Maxwell's suite and drop in to check on him.

I was worried. I'll admit it. He was too quiet. Too well behaved.

In order to safely check on Maxwell, I would have to wait until all five of the crew were settled down. Two were on watch and the other three were supposed to have dinner and then go to bed.

But it didn't happen that way.

I watched the three off-duty soldiers wander down the hall toward the crew quarters. But they never got there. Instead, they stopped outside Maxwell's door.

I switched the view to the inside of the suite. Whatever was going on, I wanted to be sure nothing happened to Maxwell.

Maxwell was not yet in bed, though he had taken a shower and was dressed in a pair of pajamas. He was reading in the main room of the suite. There must have been a noise at the door, because his head jerked up, and he stared in that direction.

I will forever thank the Gods above that I was watching Maxwell that night. If I had been doing something else at that crucial moment, I would not have caught on until too late.

As Maxwell turned to look at the door, there was a flicker, and the image fizzled for a second, and then he was staring back at his book.

I was out of my hiding place and running down the corridor as fast as I could go. If those goons didn't want their commanding officer to know what was about to happen, then....

I didn't want to think about it.

Maxwell is a very good fighter. Thinking back, I may have mentioned that I retrieved him from the clutches of a thug in a dark alley. What I did not mention was that there had originally been four of them. Luckily, Maxwell is not only a good fighter, but two of them had been very drunk.

I'm good at what I do, (there is not enough time here for a detailed explanation of the disciplines which make a martial artist) which is fight. Very good. But this isn't a Kung Fu movie. No matter how good I am, I am not going to take on a trio of professional soldiers who are older than I am. Not unless I have to. When you're Maxwell's age, or my own, you are just a bit more fragile than an adult and those extra few inches of reach can mean the difference between life and death.

As can those extra few seconds. I was almost too late.

The door to the suite was locked. I'd been expecting that. I hadn't spent three very boring days hooked into the shuttle's communication circuits without picking up the pass codes. A minute later, I was inside.

Maxwell was holding his own, barely. All three of these men knew how to fight, and they were not afraid to be vicious with a much younger and much smaller opponent. Luckily, Maxwell is himself a vicious fighter.

As I came bursting into the room, his expression lightened for a brief instant, and he left himself wide open to a shot to the head from the opponent on his right.

Maxwell went down like a stone, as did the man who had attacked him. The soldier, however, was screaming. Maxwell had left that opening in order to crush the older man's kneecap. I had no time to worry about that, as the other two men turned toward me.

They were both injured. The one on the left had a black eye and possibly a broken jaw. The one on the right was favoring his side. Broken ribs, I hoped.

It was no more than he deserved.

Not that it mattered. From the moment they laid eyes on me, they were dead men. Our only chance of escape lay in my remaining undetected and unreported.

I'd have killed them anyway.

Cold-blooded? Perhaps. But I am a killer, when the occasion calls for it. It's a nasty black stain on my honor, on my conscience, but when I became a Gundam Pilot, I had to accept this. I can kill from behind and without warning if the occasion demands - even if a part of me cringes and I hate myself for it.

Despite the things I say, I am not fighting for honor. Not the honor of the colonies, and certainly not my own.

I am fighting for life, fighting for other children, so that they may remain children until it is time to become adults. I am fighting to keep other children from becoming like me. I am fighting to give them the chance to live the life that we should have had.... I am fighting to keep them alive.

It turned out that Maxwell had broken that soldier's kneecap for me. The other two weren't too difficult to put down, but the last one was nasty - even in shock and barely able to move. Had he been uninjured, I might not have been able to defeat him. At least, not without serious injury to myself.

When I managed to bring Maxwell back to consciousness, it was heart-breaking. The blow to the head that he'd suffered had caused some cognitive problems.

He thought that he'd dreamed the whole thing. He thought that he'd been abandoned, that I had been forced to flee the school and couldn't get back to him. He had thought that he'd been alone, on his way to imprisonment and perhaps torture.

It hurt to be the one to tell him that his nightmares were no less than the truth. To see the look of relief fade from his eyes was horrible. To watch the Duo Maxwell that I knew retreat and be shown instead only the arrogant mask of Lt. Maxwell was worse.

I lost my temper, then.

I shouted at him for awhile. Failing to get much of a reaction, I took him by the shoulders and shook him.

Note: These are two things that you really should not do to someone who is probably suffering from a concussion. I knew better, but I was upset.

This combination of volume and violence snapped Duo out of his fog and he began shouting back. I am thankful that everyone else currently on board was at the far end of the shuttle, not that either of us gave a damn at the time.

What ever happened to the 'cold, ruthless terrorists' you ask? Remember, all five of us are still only 15-16 years old. Even an adult can only take so much strain and abuse.... We were both due for an emotional breakdown, he rather more so than I.

Predictably, he broke first. I'd like to say that I planned it that way, to break through his barriers and reach the Duo that I wanted so desperately to see again, but I'd be lying. It was luck, plain and simple.

He sort of folded over and shook for a while. I waited while he fought his way back to a more or less even emotional keel and wrapped my arms around him, just to let him know he wasn't alone. That this wasn't as bad as it seemed.

He needed me. This whole ordeal had been going on for too long. If he hadn't seen me heading for the shuttle bay, if he'd really believed that he had been completely deserted, I have no doubt that he'd have taken his own life on the second day of this nightmare trip.

Had he been a normal boy, he would never have lasted past the second week at Professor G's. Duo had been living with the strain and stress for almost six months....

A normal adult male would have broken in three of those months. I think I might have lasted as long as four. Duo is very strong, but enough is enough.

I couldn't leave him. He needed to know that I wasn't going to abandon him. That this wasn't the hallucination, but the reality. So I stayed, curled up around him on the floor of the suite.

It was safe enough. We would be able to hear Zechs' escort when he returned, and there was no video or audio feed from the suite to worry about. I just had to keep listening.

In the end, Duo fell asleep, and I did as well. Luckily for us both, OZ soldiers tend to wear heavy boots.

Zechs found Duo lying on the floor of the suite, a massive bruise covering one side of his face and (I discovered later) a nice set of cracked ribs to go with his concussion.

Lt. Maxwell greeted his captor with a nasty comment and passed out again.

To give him credit, the man leaped to most of the correct conclusions. A doctor was brought in to see to his 'nephew', the bodies were disposed of and the riot act was read to the rest of the crew. The two who were supposed to have been on watch were court-martialed on the spot (literally, I heard the whole thing) and new crew were sent for.

Zechs' comments on the actions of his crew were mostly unprintable. They shot the two court-martialed crewmen, took them just outside the shuttle and blew their brains out. I'll probably never forget the last thing that Zechs said to them before they were dragged out of the suite.

"Murder is murder, no matter who you are going to kill. What I am doing now is no less than murder, but it is upheld by the law and it is justice. The difference between us is that I will forever regret what I have done here today."

There are times when I can cautiously admire Zechs.

Apparently, the five soldiers left on board the shuttle had decided that they didn't want the captive Gundam pilot to live a second longer. They wanted to 'punish' him for his crimes.

I was almost sick to my stomach. It's not Duo's fault that horrible things happen during war. If it hadn't been him, it would have been someone else.

Then again, I can't help think of the five of us and Duo's 'replacement'. We are different, somehow. Would someone else have been able to make Deathscythe do the things it did? Would another boy be able to force his Gundam to do mid-air acrobatics? Would anyone other than Quatre be able to force us all to work together? Would anyone other than Heero Yuy be able to put up with the stalking habits of that Relena woman?

I am beginning to think not.

It's the pilot. It's always the pilot. We five together can do things that I do not think any other five people could hope to do. Which makes this whole situation even more insane than I had thought.

I had hoped to slip out of the suite after things had settled down and the lights had been turned out. No such luck. I guess Zechs isn't the heartless bastard he is rumored to be.

He sat by Duo's side all night, monitoring his condition and waking him up every so often to check on the concussion. When Duo had a nightmare, he murmured something soothing, and got him a drink of water.

I could have cheerfully killed him. Twice.

How do I know all of this? I spent the entire night cursing my noble impulses for deciding to stay with Duo and staring at a gleaming pair of black boots.

I suppose it serves me right for choosing to hide under the bed.


	16. We're a team, not a group therapy session.

I have finally gotten angry. Quatre said that it was past time, that I have too many problems with my emotions.

I don't think that's the case. It's true that I am not very good at expressing emotions, I never have been. But I don't have problems with them, I just don't share them. We're a team, not a group therapy session.

Trowa brought us a copy of Zechs' itinerary, and with it the information that had been sent on Maxwell. It was pretty sketchy stuff for the most part. I am beginning to doubt that G is the one who set him up as Zechs' nephew.

Not that I'm going to go any easier on the bastard. Even if he wasn't the one who actually set Maxwell at the school, his betrayal was unforgivable. He put Deathscythe's pilot in the position where his capture became possible. Not to mention what he put Maxwell through with this business of a 'replacement'.

Quatre insisted that we allow Rashid to feed the prisoner while we are gone. I did not agree, but was overruled.

I am still going over the information that Trowa retrieved for me. The information provided to OZ is too sketchy. There are too many minor details missing. Things which would not have given away anything important, but would have been noticed by anyone who actually knew Maxwell....

It looks as though someone saw Maxwell and found a use for him. A use he would never allow, no matter what the circumstances. Our enemy chose Maxwell for convenience, and slid him right out from under G's rather prominent nose.

So, we have a new enemy. I say this because the data received by OZ lacked several crucial facts about Maxwell which could have been of great use to OZ and that are certainly common knowledge around G's lab. Maxwell's strength, for instance.

He was the wrong choice if they were hoping for someone who would fold under pressure, or would give the rest of us away. Maxwell is Shinigami. He believes it, and that gives him an inner center of iron. He thinks we don't know that the antics he puts on are as much for our benefit as for his own. They might be annoying and are certainly distracting, but sometimes even we need distraction. Beneath his jokes there lurks someone much darker.

It's hard to be strong all the time. Sometimes, it's impossible. Maxwell's tom-foolery allows us an outlet for our stress, even if we do not always appreciate it. But beyond his facade of gamine idiocy, he is a killer like the rest of us. G knows this, even if he has small patience for Maxwell's methods.

Whoever set Maxwell up to be discovered seems to think that the foolishness is all that there is to him. That he pilots a mobile suit and occasionally blows things up, but has no other worthwhile skills; that he would not fight, that we would not go after him. That we would allow him to be taken away.

G knows better. I believe that I now know what happened, and why Maxwell was taken away initially, but I will wait until I have G in front of me before drawing any conclusions. We all saw Maxwell's letter. Even Quatre will not forgive what has happened. Even if G is not _technically_ our enemy, he has a great deal to answer for.

I'm not Wufei, but even I can see the injustice here. Justice will be served. Even if we have to do it ourselves.

Leaving the planet was remarkably easy. We walked into the base that had provided Maxwell with such remarkable service and took two of their larger assault shuttles.

Yes, there were explosions and mass slaughter. I filed a complete mission report and saved a copy for my personal records. I'm not going to go over it again right now.

This meant that Quatre and Trowa could share a shuttle, as the assault shuttles easily hold two Gundams. It also made things easier mission-wise. We had decided that I would go to G and demand an explanation, while Quatre and Trowa would intercept Zechs' shuttle and retrieve Maxwell.

Quatre is convinced that Chang is also on that shuttle. I did not believe him until he received a message from Chang's cousin, stating what had happened. Apparently Chang knew that he would not have time to contact us and told the younger boy to keep us informed.

It says something for Chang that he would trust something so important to someone else. Perhaps he is finally learning that you can't do everything alone.

Trowa and Quatre will go to L5, which is Zechs' next stop, and wait for him there. They believe that Chang will seize the advantage that being on his home colony will give and take this chance to escape.

Perhaps.

We parted ways as soon as we cleared the atmosphere. G's lab is, naturally enough, over by L2. I would have the shorter journey. I did have enough time, however, to go over all of the available information again. I began with Chang's rather interesting ramblings.

I'd wondered about that coat. First Maxwell, then Chang and last I saw, Quatre was carting it around.

By the end of my reading, I was almost to L2. I left the shuttle and took Wing out into space. I blew up the shuttle and took off for G's lab. Upon reflection, you would think that OZ would learn to rig those things so that when we stole them, they' be able to track us. So far, however, I haven't found a single one of them with any sort of locator system.

Maybe we should steal them more often. Sometimes I think that the OZ design crews actually work for us.

It didn't take me long to reach my destination. They were not surprised to see me. Unhappy, yes, but not surprised.

G told me everything. It's amazing how well a beam cannon works when it comes to interrogation. I simply positioned Wing outside the lab and waited until he contacted me. I think that he was afraid that it would be Maxwell who came for him, and was actually relieved to see me.

Yet another indication that it was not he who had set Maxwell up. Shinigami has a decided taste for evil revenge, another quirk that G is intimately familiar with, though I doubt Maxwell indulged around the Professor more than once.

Maxwell would take sadistic delight in telling his captors all about G, if he could figure out a way to do it that would not implicate the others involved in this project. If he escaped, he would take equally sadistic delight in hunting down G personally.

G told me everything. The Doctors had decided that the five of us were growing too comfortable together, too attached. If one of us died, we might actually grieve, or have trouble accepting a replacement. To test that theory, they decided to 'temporarily' remove Maxwell. A 'simple experiment in relationships and problem solving' as G put it.

How temporary the replacement was going to be depended on our reaction to the new Deathscythe pilot. He didn't tell me which particular reaction would have brought Maxwell back to our little group, and I didn't ask. Instead, I told him exactly what I was going to do to him if we did not get Maxwell back in one piece.

He took it rather calmly, and offered me the life of the person who had been responsible for Maxwell's discovery and subsequent capture.

Apparently, one of the senior mechanics had been seeing this woman on L2.... You can probably figure out the rest. The concept makes my head hurt. Did he have no idea of the lives he was putting at risk with his careless behavior? He hadn't told her anything terribly revealing, but enough so that she had apparently put two and two together.

When G attempted to contact Maxwell at the school, he had found that he was not listed as Maxwell's legal guardian and that this dubious privilege had been accorded Zechs Merquise. He had realized that we had all been double-crossed, and immediately began a search for the culprit that would have done the Spanish Inquisition proud.

Maxwell and Chang aren't the only ones who study.

He finally came up with this mechanic, who admitted that he had perhaps said a little too much about the spastic Deathscythe pilot who was being replaced. G locked the man up in a small cell (I didn't really want to think about those detention cells and the reason why he would have them handy) and began looking for a way into the school.

Chang beat him to it. So did Zechs.

G then began a search for the woman. Interestingly enough, he found nothing. It was as if her life had begun the night that she picked up that mechanic in a bar. They'd been seeing each other for almost a year before he let anything slip. There was little enough to be found out about her. It was as if she hadn't existed before that night, and once Maxwell had been sent to the school, she vanished again.

Sounds like a set-up job to me. I made a note to hunt down that woman. Between us, Maxwell, Chang and I should be able to find her. From there it would only be a matter of time before we discovered who sent her.

I made him send me all the data files, but found no more than he had. I then asked to speak to the mechanic, and G sent one of his assistants to fetch the man. The assistant returned, a bit pale and trembling, to report that the man was dead. Murdered in his cell.

That got my attention.

G was furious. He demanded that I get to the bottom of this. I politely declined, citing my previous mission to retrieve Maxwell. I told him that if we retrieved Maxwell in one piece and if Maxwell was feeling forgiving, we might help him with his little 'problem'. But not before.

I also pointed out that the only thing keeping me from destroying his lab and him with it, was the thought that Maxwell would probably like to do it himself - with the new Deathscythe. I could see him wondering what had happened to the other 'pilot'.

I smiled, once, and cut the connection.

I left, heading for Dr. J's place. Whatever was going on was larger than I'd thought. This wasn't OZ's style, and a lone free-lancer wouldn't have gone back for the mechanic once we already knew everything that he had to tell, and G was convinced that the man had spilled his guts.

I got a slight knot in my stomach thinking about that. I could torture someone if I had to, and do it well. That doesn't mean that I'd enjoy it and I pray that I'll never show the casual acceptance of it that G does.

If Maxwell doesn't come back here for a reckoning, I will.

Heero's part ends here.

* * *

I finally escaped from Duo's suite. He had to convince Zechs to leave and get them to turn the lights off, first. I was stuck there for almost eight hours, and was nearly too stiff to move when it was finally safe to come out. I had muscle cramps from the tension of having to lie perfectly still and remain calm while Zechs read a book only a few feet from my hiding place.

When I finally crawled out from under the bed, Duo noticed how I was moving. He had me sit on the bed and sat on the floor at my feet. He obligingly rubbed my legs until I felt I could walk again, and thanked me for coming to his rescue. He didn't specify which rescue, and I didn't need to ask. He has regained his center, his balance, even if Lt. Maxwell tends to come rather strongly to the fore.

Duo and I needed to talk and had to whisper, so as not to be overheard, and keep our conversation short. I had a plan for leaving the shuttle and escaping to the relative safety of my family once we reached L5. I had to hunch over and whisper in his ear. It was a bit uncomfortable and terribly distracting. Duo was cautiously in favor, merely cocking an eyebrow and murmuring something about my penchant for explosions.

I hate Lt. Maxwell. I hate him with a passion. He's beginning to strangle the real Duo, and there seems to be nothing I can do about it.

Idiot. When did I start caring so much about Duo? When did I lose my objectivity? And why do I feel that the answers to those questions don't really matter....

When I felt I had enough control of my legs to perform a decent 'sneak' I finally left the suite and made my way cautiously back to my hiding place. This course of action could cause trouble for my family.... I finally decided to leave a few subtle 'clues' to my identity.... With luck, they would conclude that I had stolen a ride on the shuttle from Earth, and had no connection with L5 at all.

You can't rely on luck, but I had to do something.

The day or so of our trip was difficult. Duo was having trouble with headaches, unsurprisingly. None of the crew would come near him. I wasn't surprised. They blamed the deaths of those three crew members on him. They weren't to know that I was the one who had so viciously crushed them.

I don't care to dwell on what I did. I am not usually cruel, but for some reason I had chosen to destroy those three men, rather than simply kill them. Oh, they were just as dead in the end, but it had been brutal and painful. Not because it had to be, but because I had chosen it to be so. I am still not sure why I did it, but it makes me feel sick. I'm not a monster.

Am I?

Zechs was unfailingly polite to Duo, who accepted this new, gentler treatment without comment. It was beginning to make me nervous again. Zechs was spending entirely too much time with Duo. Even more than he had previously. What was going through that man's head?

What is he hoping to get out of Duo? Is this simply a 'good OZ, bad OZ' routine? Is Duo falling for this friendly act? I am beginning to obsess over this?

Probably.

I need to get Duo off this shuttle. I need to find Master O and discover just what all this means. I need to find Professor G and kill him with my bare hands. Slowly.

I am obsessing. This is not good.

We'll get to L5 tomorrow. Duo knows what to do once we land. We'll get out of this mess first and worry about O and G later. I turned back to my plans, but found myself staring at the monitor which showed Duo's suite as Zechs brought him lunch. Prepared with his own two lily white hands, no less.

I'm going to kill that platinum blonde creep. See if I don't.

Wufei's part ends here

* * *

Trowa and I let Heero go after G. I wasn't sure that I would be able to handle him the way it needed to be done. Trowa had announced his intentions of burning G's lab to the ground if he had to come into contact with the man, so we decided that he ought to come with me.

Trowa handles betrayal a little more personally than the rest of us. Perhaps it's because he's had more experience with it. I didn't ask. When he wants to talk about it, he will.

Anyway, I was sure that Wufei would try to get Duo away when the shuttle reached L5. Trowa didn't have any better ideas, so we headed that way. We arrived with almost a full day to spare.

Infiltration was difficult, to say the least. Finding a place to dock a stolen OZ assault carrier was more than a little challenging. Trowa managed it, somehow. He has contacts everywhere. Maybe it has something to do with his casual use of the name Barton.

I had arranged for Chen to meet us and we found ourselves holed up at his parent's house.

I only speak a few words of Chinese, and Trowa's knowledge is on par with mine. Chen had to translate for us once or twice, but luckily most of L5 uses languages that either Trowa or I actually have some working knowledge of.

Wufei is respected here. Not particularly well-liked, I noted, but respected. Half the colony is related to him, and most of them are well aware that he is the pilot of Gundam 05. They take family loyalty and respect to great lengths. Apparently they feel there is no danger in Wufei's calling being known to his entire family.

And we found out about Meiran.... No wonder Wufei has always been so focused - and so angry. Marriage and death are very serious things, particularly to someone our age, and particularly to someone of his culture.

Grief is a difficult burden to bear at any age. That he could do so and still retain his loyalty to us and his skills as a pilot speak of depths that I did not know he had. Wufei is a very complicated person. Unfortunately, he is also tied up in knots. Until he comes to a better understanding of himself and his feelings, he is still going to be lost.

I think I need to stop analyzing people. It's a hobby that tends to give you a headache.

We found ourselves secreted in the hangar when Zechs' shuttle docked. No sooner had it touched down than there was an explosion by the rear cargo bay.

As the local OZ soldiers scrambled to fight the fire and the shuttle crew evacuated, I felt more than saw two slender figures slip away from the far side of the shuttle. There was an emergency hatch there, I remembered, standard for that class of shuttle. As we reached the spot where they had disappeared, a red-coated figure and two soldiers also dropped from the rear escape hatch.

Zechs is a very canny man.

We had not come unprepared for this eventuality. Two of Wufei's family, heavily masked, appeared and held guns on Zechs and his companions until we were safely away. I hope those two volunteers managed to escape unharmed, but I didn't really have time to worry. We had to find Duo and Wufei.

When we finally caught up with our comrades, they had taken shelter with one of Wufei's old teachers. It was a slightly strained, albeit joyous, reunion.

Duo looked so different without his hair, and it was obvious that the strain had been getting to him. He was still wound up very tightly, unable to relax even now. It would be some time before he really accepted that he was free. He has a whole new set of mannerisms, and they scared me a little. Not that the mannerisms themselves were too bad, but the fact that he was having trouble letting go of them. They were bothering Trowa as well, but I could see that it was Wufei who was most hurt by them.

If Duo looks strange, Wufei looks like an entirely different person. With his red on black clothing and his long hair floating loose, I might have mistaken him for someone else. He has finally lost that nasty focus which I now realize must have been his pain over the death of his wife. It is still there, but it no longer forms the core of his being. His expression and manner have changed as well. I can no longer believe him cold and uncaring. Now that he has begun to heal, it is as if there is a whole different person underneath waiting to be discovered.

But he still has a long way to go.

I can see the sweet-tempered, shy scholar that his aunt described so fondly, not that he'll ever return completely. Wufei is a Gundam pilot now, and like the rest of us, changed forever. But it's nice to know that he is no longer focused on self-destruction.

But there's still a fragility there, as if he's changing too much, too fast.

We have all been changed by this experience, I think Duo and Wufei most of all. But I can feel the changes in myself and even see them clearly in Trowa and Heero. I think that we are stronger, if slightly sadder. We are more than just soldiers in a common cause. We are allies, friends - family.

This will not happen again.

Trowa and I will leave Wufei here. Wufei showed his old self quite decisively and insisted that he would seek out Master O and take the new Shenlong from him, in the name of Truth and Justice, no less. He is angry, almost exceedingly so, and is letting his frustrations show in his determination to take control of this situation.

I did not argue. I could sense that he was close to exploding with pent up emotion and it would be safest to let him come to terms with this on his own. We left Duo with him. Wufei would not even consider allowing us to take him away. The two seem to find support in each other, forming a partnership which will do them both good in the long run.

I know that Wufei will help Duo deal with his emotional problems. I know that they can take care of themselves and each other physically. I also know that Zechs is not they type to give up easily....

Heero's report reached us that night. Trowa and I are to meet him at J's place. We leave in the morning. If all goes well, the new Sandrock and Heavyarms will be brought to us there. If not, we will go to S and H and take them.

It is time to take action. After seeing what happened to Duo and taking in the reality of what has happened to him, Trowa and I are as one in our resolve.

We aren't going to be victims for anyone. Not ever again.


	17. Let us not forget the explosions.

Life's been - interesting, lately.

And that's in comparison to being shanghaied, incarcerated, forced to do reams of pointless schoolwork, captured and beaten up.

And the explosions. Let us not forget the explosions.

We escaped the OZ goons fairly easily. I got all my stuff together and waited. Wu had rigged the rear cargo hatch of the shuttle, and it blew out with an impressive show of smoke and fire moments after we landed. The explosion shorted out the electrical circuits in the after half of the shuttle, so I broke out of my room, met Wu and we headed at speed for the rear escape hatch. We popped the hatch and took off running.

And that did wonders for my headache, let me tell you.

After about twenty minutes of high speed twisting and turning, we eventually ended up at a school, or temple - I'm not sure which. It was run by this gloomy old fella that Wu used to study with. Nice guy, though.

He got rid of my uniform and got me some new clothes, just like Wu's old ones, only in solid black. I felt better almost immediately.

Shinigami doesn't wear prissy uniforms.

I had just finished changing my clothes when Quatre and Trowa arrived. There was a great deal of hugging, something I'd expected from Quatre, but was rather shocked to receive from Trowa. I'm glad Heero wasn't there. The mental image of he and Trowa giving each other a welcoming hug was enough to overload the circuits in my brain. Urgh. That just does not compute.

I've got a headache, and not from being knocked on the head. All right, I do still have a headache from that, but this one's different. I've been thinking.

Chen told me not to strain myself. I wish I'd strangled the little bastard when we roomed together. He has a right to be pissed at me, I mean, I did treat him like shit. But he's gloating - and I think that's laying it on a bit thick.

Yeah, I had a reunion with Chen, he came in with Trowa and Quatre. It'll never rank up there with my top ten 'happiest, most warm and fuzzy moments'. His comment, upon beholding my bruised and battered form, was something along the lines of, "Great Gods above and below! You risked our lives for Him?!"

I wasn't going to take that.... I gave him my best feral snarl - just before Wu jabbed me in the ribs. He didn't even look to see what my expression was, just muttered, "Drop it, Duo."

That shut me up. Wu's never called me Duo. Not ever.

Then we had a little discussion about the Alliance. Chen was an active participant, which sort of surprised me. It surprised Trowa as well. Quatre didn't even blink an eye.

The Alliance leaders appear to be sincere in their requests for peace, and the colonies are honoring that sincerity. But there's deep-seated rot and a decay so bad that it stinks even to those of us in space.

At first, the smell appears to be coming from OZ, but that's not the case. The rot within the Alliance spreads all about the OZ Special Forces, but for some reason has not yet managed to work its way within. There are also problems stemming from the Romafeller foundation, where the stink of rot is almost worse than that coming from the Alliance. This begs the question; who controls the Alliance?

The peace loving generals aren't making much headway, which argues for some fairly powerful opposition from within. But for some reason, I feel that the real danger lies elsewhere. OZ is threatening, yes, but there's more to it than that.

We're still missing too many pieces of the puzzle. Heero has gone to see Dr. J. Perhaps more information has surfaced since the others left Earth. We can hope so, anyway.

Quatre then came up with the brilliant plan that I accompany him and Trowa back to Earth to pick up Deathscythe. That sounded good. I really wanted to get my hands on the new and improved Deathscythe. And that nasty little weasel that tried to take it away from me....

"Absolutely not."

We all turned to stare at Wu. I don't think he'd even realized that he'd said it out loud. He blushed for a second, but recovered fast. There followed a short argument between Wu and Quatre which boiled down to Wu's insistence that I needed some time to relax and come to grips with myself before trying to work with my new Gundam. He was also against my committing murder.

Quatre finally agreed with him.

Nobody asked me what I thought. I thought that I should probably be upset over that, but I wasn't. It was all right. The only reason that they didn't want me out murdering people is that they want to do it for me.

Sort of a get well present.

Wu was right - is right. I'm still pretty messed up. I've been living on my nerves for months. You can't do that without locking yourself up pretty firmly. I shouldn't be running around with a weapon capable of melting holes in bedrock.... No matter how much I want to.

Life sucks.

Anyway, back to my headache. It began with Wu's 'command decision' to keep me around. Why? After all the pain-in-the-assery he's been through with me, I'd thought he'd be happy to be rid of me. I could still've gone with Quatre and clown-boy, even if they wouldn't let me wreak the havoc and destruction I would've liked. But no, Wu wanted me to stay where he could keep an eye on me.

He's never struck me as the mother hen type. Heero? Sure. Quatre? No question. Even Trowa has his moments where he keeps one eye on the rest of us. But Wufei?

It got worse after he gave me back my laptop. I knew that he had it, of course. When Zechs and the goon squad tossed my room, the first thing they went for was the laptop. I almost freaked. I hadn't actually been erasing my thoughts and comments, just tucking them away out of sight. A serious code-breaker or someone really into computer systems would have found those files in a heartbeat.

It was Wu's laptop, of course, but I died a thousand deaths till they reported there was nothing in the thing. Which meant that Wu had my laptop and the diary. He'd know exactly where to look for those files. That was okay. At least the OZzies didn't have it.

I never actually thought he'd read the damn thing....

He didn't just read it, either. After a few entries, he began making notes. If it'd been a regular diary, he'd've been scribbling in the margins. I guess the waiting around on the shuttle was harder on him than on me. At least I had homework.

Me, giving thanks for homework.... Armageddon is nigh, gotta be. But back to the diary.

It was a facet of my education (think Terrorism 101) never to write anything down. Well, everyone knows that sometimes you HAVE to write it down, so there are exceptions to every rule. In the case of those exceptions, you make sure to only write some things down. In fact, my writing tends to leave out large, fairly important bits for just that reason. On the other hand, it works a bit like a code. Someone with similar training can usually figure out exactly where you've left things out, and sometimes what. The trick is to keep them guessing as to why.

'Kay, here's a bit of exposition, just to show you that my fancy, schmancy education isn't going to waste. Just 'cuz the way I write echoes my somewhat low-brow speech patterns, doesn't mean that I can't theorize with the best of 'em. (Yeah, Wu cleaned up my writing here and there. I write like this 'cuz it amuses me, not 'cuz I want better grades or because I give a flying fuck about my hypothetical audience's opinion. I enjoy bad grammar, slang and sentence fragments.)

Now, pay attention -

So Wu took my rambling and ranting and read it, every damn word. Well and good. He even apparently understood it. That's okay too, I guess. But here's where my headache took a turn for the worse.

Those notations he made weren't just random comments. I made some crack about how grouchy he was, and he added.... Well, it doesn't matter, but it shed infinite amounts of light on the way his mind works.

It made me curious.

So I re-read my whole diary, six months of rambling, ranting, raving and massive amounts of self-pity and doubt. Man, I can be such a pathetic whiner.... Wu read all this and still rescued me. I'd've left me to rot.

And those notations only appeared in places where I had actually left out something - like my haircut. Or that nasty episode at the Prof's lab. Or the way I felt about certain of my schoolmates. And each time he wrote something, it was seemingly just a throw-away line. But to the person who'd written that journal....

He'd done more than read my diary. He'd understood it. He'd seen that I was writing down all those things that I just had to get out of my system or explode, and he'd understood that too. And I'd taken such pains to be sure that no one would.

It was disturbing. And those notes were for me. He hadn't been jotting things down to pass the time. Wu's got a mind like a steel trap. He remembers the damndest things and he analyzes the things he runs across as a sort of insane hobby.

But why?? Not that the end result wasn't therapeutic, in a sort of disturbing fashion. I felt like he'd been leaning over my shoulder through the whole mess - reassuring, but a bit creepy. Why did he bother to spend the time on it?

So, I had a headache.

Then Zechs decided that he wasn't leaving without me. He left off the 'dead or alive' bit, but it seemed to be understood. Suddenly the entire colony was crawling with people who were searching for me.

I hate that man.

The first thing that Zechs did, upon finding an office at the local Alliance Headquarters, was to send for my roomies, Chang Lian and Chang Chen. Just flaming marvelous.

Of course, that would be the logical thing to do. I escaped on L5, and was given aid both before and after my breakout. And my only two roommates at the school had both been from L5, and were even related. It looked awfully suspicious.

Wufei and Chen obligingly appeared before the Zechs-meister, thereby giving me the time I needed to read the above diary and give myself the aforementioned headache. I had lots of time in which to do it. Zechs held them both overnight, probably just because he could.

I am actually fairly impressed that Zechs managed to get so much done. The Alliance officers here cherish a real hate for the OZ Specials. Something about being stranded on the L5 duty post while the OZzies get to go charging about where ever they want.

I learned later that Wu had made a few cutting comments about my personal habits and then just let Chen rant for a bit. Zechs apparently came to the conclusion that I was no friend of theirs, and that I'd much prefer falling into his hands than those of my former roommates.

Wu's comments aside, I don't really think that he'd rip Zechs' 'platinum blonde' hair out by the roots, but the desire was certainly there and the OZ guys might have picked up on that. So I spent most of the night worrying. Zechs creeps me out in some ways. He always seems able to sense the things that you aren't saying.

That could spell trouble for Wu.

The cousins came back the following afternoon, both of them in a foul mood. It must run in their family.

Chen is blaming me for the whole mess. We had a polite disagreement about that, until Wu smacked me in the side again. I turned to look at him, and froze in my tracks at his glare.

He must've been taking lessons from Heero....

"I hate that," he snarled. "Drop that thrice-damned attitude and start acting like yourself, Maxwell - or so help me I'll leave you here when I go back to Earth."

Yup, he was upset. So was I. I'd been drawling very sarcastically at Chen. My usual mode of attack would have been to shout and say something extremely rude with a cheeky grin. Lt. Maxwell strikes again, Goddammit.

I muttered some sort of shamefaced apology and went straight to my room. As I shut the door behind me, I heard him start in on Chen. I felt better almost instantly.

I went down to breakfast the next morning to find Chen waiting for me. "Something's up," he told me bluntly.

I helped myself to something to eat and waited for him to elaborate. It took him awhile to say anything else, and I amused myself by watching him squirm. My amusement went straight out the window with his next statement.

"I think Wufei's in trouble."

Next thing I knew, I was kneeling on Chen's chest, glaring down at him. "What the fuck do you mean by that! Who, what, where, when, why and how? Spit it out, man!"

Chen threw me across the room. I guess Wu's not the only martial arts buff in his family. I landed on my feet, thankfully, and managed to calm down. Chen didn't seem terribly upset about my reaction, just a little pissy as to my methods.

Turns out, Wu'd been summoned by the clan heads for a little 'chat'. I didn't see the threat in that, but Chen insisted that we go to the meeting and eavesdrop. Apparently, Wu's interview didn't start for another ten minutes or so, and Chen knew a place where we'd be able to see and hear everything.

I made a mental note to check out why Chen was being so damn helpful this morning, but went with it.

Note to self: 1. Learn Chinese soonest. 2. Never, ever go anywhere with some sort of audio or visual recording equipment. 3. Never, ever, ever piss Chang Wufei off.

This next bit will be a bit confusing, but bear with me.

So, I found myself lying side by side with Chen and some girl along a large skylight, peering down into a giant room. She was another cousin, I discovered. The Chang family is _huge_, but I guess Wu is a direct descendant of someone important, and thus significant. I didn't catch all of it. They were whispering and I was trying to follow what was going on below us.

It was a pretty cool scene. The room had a raised section along the outer edge on three sides. On the short side were seated five or six of the oldest human beings I've ever seen. Chen told me they were the clan elders. Deference to age is very important in their culture. I can respect that. In order to live to be that old, you've gotta be plenty smart or veeery lucky.

The floor of the room and the walls were wooden and polished to a fare-the-well. The elders were seated on these red cushions that matched the hangings at the far end of the room. The Changs have a serious thing for the color red, I've decided.

On the left side of the U was a young lady, seated on another cushion. She was wearing what looked, to me at least, to be a very uncomfortable get up with about twelve layers. Chen and the girl (he called her Saiming) did not look at all happy to see her there.

Truthfully, she didn't look very happy either.

I got my first clue as to what was going on when the hangings were thrown aside and Wu strode into the room. He was wearing loose white pants and a white tanktop with his white jacket hooked carelessly over one shoulder. His hair was pulled back into the familiar ponytail, though it was longer than it used to be, and his expression was severe.

My heart sank. This did not look good. Wu said he'd gotten rid of the white....

Chen and Saiming were murmuring something in Chinese, and when I asked for a translation, I was told to hush up. I finally got Chen to tell me that the girl was Saiming's twin sister, but that was it.

The elders each said something that sounded ceremonial, ie rehearsed and boring. Wu didn't say anything, but bowed politely when they were through and waited.

There was a long silence. Apparently, they had expected him to make more of a response. Finally, the old guy in the middle spoke again.

This speech went on for some time, and he ended by gesturing at the young lady.

I had been watching Wu throughout this speech, cursing my inability to understand what was being said. I didn't really need the translation, though. I could see the knuckles on the hand clenching his jacket quite clearly and they began turning white about thirty seconds into the speech. His expression didn't change, but I could tell that he was getting angry. By the time the old guy finished up, I was wondering just what the hell he had said to so totally cheese Wu off.

I waited for Wu to explode, but he surprised me. Pivoting on one foot, he bowed to the young lady with exquisite grace. It even looked more polite than the one he had given the geezers. He murmured a few short words to her, and she immediately looked a lot happier, then quickly schooled her expression back to looking upset.

I shot a glance at the old guy, and was sure he was going to fall over dead from apoplexy. Chen and Saiming were clutching each other for dear life, staring down into the room. Whatever was going on was obviously more than a little important, and I couldn't understand a WORD! I made a resolution to get Wu to teach me Chinese.

As the guy who had been speaking struggled for words, an old lady at one end of the little line of elders said something that sounded awfully condescending. Bad line to take with Wu.

He swept her a bow that was so deep that it was obvious even to me that he was mocking her. He then said one or two sentences and turned to leave again. That set up a general outcry. He paused, allowing them to shout at his back for a few minutes, then turned again.

"Oh man, is he pissed," I murmured.

Saiming looked at me strangely. "How can you tell?" she asked.

It was actually a pretty good question, his facial expression hadn't changed since he walked through the door, and his hands had relaxed again. I shrugged. "He looks just like that when he's about to kill someone," was the answer I finally gave her.

They both looked at me, horrified. I guess they'd never really considered their cousin as a cold-blooded killer. When will I learn to think before I speak?

I shrugged irritably. "What do you think Gundam pilots do?" I hissed. "Play parcheesi with the OZ troops?"

Our attention was dragged back to the little scene below as Wu began to speak. His first sentence shut the rest of them up. This was when I made my mental note never, ever to get him angry at me.

He spoke for almost five minutes, never moving from the spot where he had turned, making no elaborate gestures and never raising his voice. At the end of his speech, he shook out his jacket and swung it around like a cloak, smoothly shrugging it on as it came to rest on his shoulders.

Well, well, well. It wasn't white after all. The white had merely been the lining. The jacket that he wore as he stalked out of the room was black, unadorned save for the white dragon coiled between his shoulder blades. There was some sort of symbolism there, between the two colors and the way he didn't show which color it was till the last minute, but the meaning escaped me.

There was a long silence after he disappeared through the hangings, and then all five of the clan elders began shouting at each other. The girl in the fancy outfit took this as her cue to get while the getting was good and disappeared after Wu.

We exchanged glances and followed her example. As soon as we were safely out of earshot, I grabbed Chen and demanded an explanation. I didn't get it.

Wu rounded the corner and snagged me by my collar. "You can tell me later just what you were doing up there, Maxwell," he snapped.

"But...I...Chen...."

"Never mind," he sighed. "Therein lies a very long, convoluted story, I'm sure. Come on, I've just made this place too hot to hold us."

"Like it wasn't already?" I asked, trying to disentangle his fingers from the high collar of my jacket. He wasn't letting go. He swung me to face him and glared.

"Before, they probably wouldn't have handed you over to Zechs. That man is damnably determined and at the moment it might strike them as an attractive way to rid the colony of all three of us," his voice was grim.

Chen put out a hand to disengage his cousin from my collar, but Wu just glared at him, and he pulled back his hand. "Thank you, Cousin," he murmured.

"Thank you, Cousin," Saiming echoed. She darted forward to hug Wu and then disappeared down the corridor. Chen made haste to follow.

"Just what the hell was that all about?" I demanded.

Wu gave me another one of those glares. "Not now Duo!"

I deduced from his use of my first name that I had been provisionally forgiven. "So, if we can't stay here, where shall we go?"

Wu sighed and finally let go of my collar. Avoiding my eyes and the question, he put up one hand and removed the band in his hair, letting it fall free again. When I gave him a funny look, he shrugged and made an embarrassed face. "I'm not used to wearing it that way anymore."

I could relate.

We didn't actually have to 'escape' the colony. We gathered our things and went to one of the smaller hangars. Wu was quietly arrogant to the man in charge and we walked off with a cargo shuttle. Figuratively speaking, that is.

I asked him about that, too. "Just how much influence does your family have?"

He shrugged. "It's our colony."

Which put him up there with Quatre, only with cousins instead of sisters. Except I doubt that Quatre would ever have Wu's unconscious arrogance. Somewhere along the way, Chang Wufei had become accustomed to the almost casual use of power. And there was more to it than that. He had given his clan elders the brush-off, and from Saiming's reaction alone I gathered that this was something which was simply 'not done'.

Great. Just as I start figuring the guy out....

"Where are we going?"

"To see Master O."

That shut me up again. When I finally recovered.... "Why? I mean, he was going to replace you!"

Wufei shrugged. "It wasn't his idea. Besides, he and Chen don't get along."

"CHEN!?"

I finally forced him to quit staring into the shuttle displays and come clean. While the Prof (May-his-soul-rot-in-hell-for-all-eternity, Amen) had wanted to see if replacing me was a viable option, Master O hadn't wanted to replace Wufei.

But the elders did.

Again, this pointed to Wu being a hell of a lot more than he seemed. And he played right into their hands when he decided to put off his mourning. That young lady, Saiming's sister, had been produced as his new bride, no ifs ands or buts. So he hadn't if, and or but-ted them. He'd simply told them that it was not an option and stalked off.

I knew that wasn't the whole story. It doesn't take a five minute speech to tell someone to fuck off and die. What else had he told them, I wonder?

I got the feeling that he won't be going home again, voluntarily anyway. I don't have any idea as to how that affects him, though. He shut up after that. It was a quiet ride to Master O's lab which was close to L5, just an hour or so away by shuttle.

I was still nervous. I wanted Deathscythe firmly around me before coming face to face with another one of those maniacs. Wu must've known how I felt, 'cuz he gave me another lecture.

It ended with, "...you can stay in the shuttle if you like, but I intend to get some answers - which I may or may not decide to share with you. And I certainly won't share them with Lt. Maxwell."

The bastard is determined to force me to drop all my defenses. Probably for my own good. If he were Heero, I'd throw something at him. If he were Trowa, I'd attempt to reason with him. If he were Quatre, I'd make big puppy eyes. If it were me.... I'd make me do this.

Damn him. I went. We spaced Lt. Maxwell together, figuratively, anyway. I'm not sure if he'll be back or not. In a way, I miss him already. He made excellent armor. Maybe that's why Wu hates him so much. Wu's got the same problem, and I think that seeing Lt. Maxwell made him see his own mask clearly for the first time. I don't think he likes it anymore than I liked Lt. Maxwell.

So, I now have a new project to amuse myself with. Who is the real Chang Wufei? Why is he so determined to keep me around, yet won't willingly make eye contact with me? Like I can't figure it out.... I'm not completely clueless, you know, previous track record aside. The only question I have, is...

...what should I do about it?


	18. Everything is obvious with the benefit of hindsight.

We left Maxwell with Chang.

Chang's argument had been that Maxwell needed him. Not in so many words, perhaps, but that was what it boiled down to. Quatre agreed with him. Or at least, that was the impression he gave them. I knew better.

There is something bothering Chang. Quatre obviously thinks that he and Maxwell can help each other, but I don't think that this is the best answer. It is fairly obvious that Maxwell is part of the problem.

Surprisingly, Maxwell did not either join in or comment on the argument. More surprisingly, he accepted Quatre's decision with a non-committal 'hn'. He was doing an excellent imitation of Yuy overall, as a matter of fact. It was mildly unsettling to see him like that. He was rigid, restrained and totally lacking in charm. When he noticed that I was staring at him, he managed a fairly good imitation of his old manner, but that was all it was - an imitation.

I cannot forgive G for this, above the rest. Maxwell has been forcibly changed, and it has left a permanent mark. It is something from which he may never truly recover.

Quatre is sure that Chang can help Maxwell 'find himself' and that Maxwell will teach Chang something about being 'free'. We'll see. I doubt that it will be anything like that simple.

We met Yuy at one of Dr. J's smaller labs on L1. Apparently, he had simply walked into J's main lab with a gun and announced that he wanted his new Gundam and an explanation. To J's credit, he received both of those things, and more.

They really had been running an experiment to see how we would be affected by the loss of one of our own. But no matter what G may have said or even believed, I do not for an instant harbor the belief that J would have allowed Maxwell to return to us. Maxwell has had a 'humanizing' affect on us all, and it is most obvious in Yuy. J does not like the change, and blames it completely on Maxwell. He may be right, but Yuy will never go back to the cold, empty-hearted shell that he was. We have all had an effect on each other, now. Maxwell was just the obvious catalyst.

Yuy was working at the diplomatic offices which the Alliance used on L1 as a base for their 'peace-keeping' operations. J had inserted him there almost instantly, and he had found, or rather - not found - some rather disturbing things.

The Alliance was being manipulated by OZ. This was not such a great surprise, considering what I had found on Earth. The surprise came at the depth and complexity of the webs being spun by the OZ leadership, and behind them, the Romafeller Foundation.

The rot was deep, and still OZ appears mostly unstained by it, despite the fact that it surrounds them completely. That means something, but I cannot tell what.

For example, OZ knew that five Gundam pilots had left the Earth, but only four Gundams. There was an intensive but low-key hunt going on for that fifth Gundam - and they even knew which one they were looking for.

Yuy was angry. He pointed out that none of this made any sense. The OZ forces seemed able to come up with some very accurate and damaging information. Maxwell's location and his employment as one of the Gundam pilots, is a good example. Then, the fact that Gundam 05 was still on Earth somewhere.

On the other hand, although they had Maxwell's location and identity, they did not know which Gundam pilot he was. How could they have his name and his circumstances and yet miss that vital piece of information? Especially as G's lab is on L2....

How could they have known that it was Gundam 05 that we left behind? With the transports that we took, we 'might' have been able to take it with us from the spaceport, but it could have been deduced that there were, indeed, only the three of us there that night. If they didn't know that Gundam 02 was Maxwell's Gundam, and they had not managed to positively identify the three that left the Earth together, how did they know that the one left behind was Gundam 05? And how did they know that Gundam 02 was in space, when they didn't know which one Maxwell had left with?

And why didn't they know about the remodeled 02, which was also on Earth? There were just too many questions. I had J send Yuy's information, along with this list of questions, to O. I wanted to see what conclusions Chang would draw from this data.

We are all above average at almost every thing. We each have overlapping specialties. But being a Gundam Pilot means that you are not only exceptional at most things, you have a single talent that brings you far above the normal scale.

Yuy's skill is computers and flight. We can all do amazing things with computers, but Yuy can do things that the people who designed the computers would not believe was possible. His skill at piloting things that fly is equally amazing. But Yuy is not a killer. Despite his threats and his determination, he holds human life in high regard. He will not kill unless he has to, which actually puts him in the minority among the rest of us.

Quatre can communicate. It's an underrated skill. Give him three hours alone with the heads of the Alliance and they would be agreeing with everything he said. That's the other part. He is a natural leader. The five of us are very different and in many ways completely unsuited to working as a unit. But we all listen to Quatre, and usually end up doing exactly what he wants us to. His other strength is his belief. He believes in our mission, he believes in himself, and he believes in us.

Chang is our analyst. He can take a heap of raw data and come up with an answer that was seemingly plucked from the air. And that answer will be the correct one. He has a highly disciplined mind. He also has a highly disciplined body. I am the only one who can stand up to him in hand to hand combat, and it is a competition which is usually heavily weighted in his favor. He has high standards of honor and a strict moral code which will probably get him killed if he's not careful.

Maxwell - that one is a bit difficult. Maxwell is the best actual pilot. He can make his Gundam do things which should be impossible on a regular basis. He is also the best killer. He does exactly what he has to, without compunction or hesitation of any sort. I am not saying that he is heartless or cruel, but once he has chosen a course of action he will go over, under or through any obstacles in his path without pause or regret. He will take the non-violent path if it is offered, but also will not hesitate to slit the throat of someone who is determined to stand in his way. But he does it because he believes that the end justifies the means. He will mourn the fallen once the mission has been completed.

I could write a great deal more about each of them, but the fact remains that we are highly specialized individuals, each with our own skills and abilities. As a unit, we could conceivably control the entire human race, or at least destroy it utterly. That is why who we are is more important than what we are. We have given ourselves to the goal of stopping the Alliance's occupation, destroying their weapons base and bringing freedom to the colonies and even the Earth. That is what we live for, and that is why our existence as living weapons is tolerated.

Tolerated. Not encouraged or supported, but endured. Even the colonies that we are fighting for do not comprehend what we have gone through and what we will continue to suffer so that they may eventually know freedom. We five are the only ones who can hope to understand each other. We are the only ones that know what has been sacrificed and is still being sacrificed.

We are the only ones we can trust.

I joined Yuy at the Alliance office the next day. Between the two of us, we combed through every file and examined every piece of data. We finally found a large part of what we were looking for, but by then it was too late. Too late for the Alliance. Too late for many innocent people.

Too late for poor Chang.

And almost too late to save ourselves.

 

Trowa's Part Ends

 

It was one of those historical moments. I've seen the old programs where people told where they were when JFK was assassinated. People remembering exactly what they were doing when the Challenger Shuttle exploded.

I was combing through the various reports generated by my Earth-side contacts when it happened.

There is a large screen mounted on one of the walls of J's lab and it is tuned permanently to the major news channel of the alliance. As I was turning from one file to the next, there came the two-toned chiming which usually preceded an emergency report. I looked up from my computer in time to see an end to the fragile peace that we had enjoyed for the past six or seven months.

OZ had apparently discovered Shenlong. Its hiding place had not been chosen in order to conceal it from an intense, ground-level search, but to hide it from anyone flying overhead, or searching casually for a large, concealed object made of gundanium.

It wasn't that fact alone that spelled the end of our efforts thus far. They had apparently also found someone to pilot it. The new picture showed Wufei's beloved Gundam standing in the smoking ruins of a stately manor, moments before Shenlong self-destructed.

As the footage began to play again, a voice-over told us that the 'vicious and unprovoked' attack on Marshall Noventa and his family in their home had resulted in a massacre. He and his entire family had been killed. Also among the dead were his second in command and three of their staunchest supporters. Apparently there had been a gathering at the Noventa estate to celebrate his wife's birthday....

I passed out then.

I awoke an hour or so later, my chest heavy and painful. I had been carefully tucked into a bunk, and I knew that Heero and Trowa had returned safely. J would have left me lying where I fell, as long as I wasn't too badly underfoot.

The anger, the hatred and the heavy dull feeling that warned of impending violence made it difficult for me to think. I concentrated on the task at hand and managed to climb from the bunk.

There had been children in the Noventa household, and innocent family members both of the Marshall and his visitors. There had been servants, employees minding their own business and that of their master.

But the children....

Whoever had planned this attack had meant to cause a schism between the Earth and the colonies. The casual brutality of the gesture almost made me sick. I hung onto anger instead. Anger and a grim determination to find whoever had planned this outrage and make them pay.

Duo's disappearance hadn't saved Noventa's life or stopped the violence after all. Oh God, Wufei....

What will his reaction to this be? The slaughter of non-combatants, innocents and children - all laid directly at his doorstep, as the pilot of Gundam 05.

The pain grew sharper. I struggled to the doorway. I had to find Trowa and Heero. We had to do something. Find our enemy. Stop this stupid, pointless carnage....

 

Quatre's Part Ends

 

We barely made it out of the Alliance base before all hell broke loose. We slipped into a nearby shop during the confusion and helped ourselves to clothing that was a little less likely to draw fire.

The OZ Specials made mincemeat of the Alliance garrison. By the time we got back to J's small on-station lab, it was almost over. Trowa found Quatre lying half under the desk he had been using, curled up in a ball, obviously in pain.

The chaos in the lab was worse than what was going on in the streets outside, and while Trowa took care of Quatre, I tried to find out what was going on.

Someone played back the original footage for me, as the scene being broadcast had switched to OZ troops searching through the rubble for survivors. At that instant, a second emergency broadcast came through....

OZ is taking out the Alliance all across the Earth and in the other colonies. And everyone was howling for our blood, the blood of the five Gundam pilots. The colonies themselves had denied any knowledge or approval of our actions and cast us adrift.

Trowa caught up with me then and we found J just as he was beginning the total evacuation of the lab. We agreed that we had to take Quatre and get back to Earth. We had to get Maxwell and Chang as well. Having all five Gundams reappear might lend some credence to any claims of innocence we might make. More importantly, we will need all five of us in order to stand against the monsters who would slaughter innocents and place the blame on others.

I can only imagine what Chang must be thinking right now. When he left Earth, it had been with the implicit understanding that he needed to hide his Gundam from the doctors and from us. He had no way of knowing that the enemy would make such a concentrated search ground. No way of knowing that someone would find it and use it for such a foul purpose.

Speaking of which, where did they find a pilot....

I'm not going to think about that right now. Our escape will not be easy as it is, and attempting to think logically while in the grip of a homicidal rage is...difficult.

Trowa and I found Quatre clinging to the wall of the hallway. He was barely able to recognize us. We picked him up and carried him off, ignoring his protests that we had to find Chang and Maxwell.

"We have bigger problems," I told him. "And so do they."

Zechs Marquise was still on L5. Maxwell and Chang might have to fight their way past him to return to Earth. There's no room for two in the cockpit of a Gundam, not for more than a few minutes, anyway, and no way that Chang could fly his Gundam all the way to Earth from L5 in one shot, no matter how amazing the upgrades.

And what about us? I have a new Gundam with a new, untested system. Wing has been disassembled for spare parts. The new Sandrock and Heavyarms arrived this morning, thankfully, and haven't even been unloaded.

The older Gundams are already on their way back to their respective colonies, leaving us with totally untested machines. We'll have to take them directly to Earth and run tests there. Howard should be able to tweak them appropriately.

But Maxwell and Chang.... I can't help worrying, especially judging by Quatre's reaction to events. I guess Chang and I aren't the only ones who can pull things out of the air. He was able to get it under control by the time we reached the hangar, thankfully.

He'd have to fly his own shuttle back to Earth, we didn't have the time to transfer the new Gundams to a larger shuttle.

We'll have to split up and try to re-unite once we reach Earth. May this arrival go better than the last one.

Please.

 

Heero's Part Ends

 

O was cautiously pleased to see us. When I told him that Chen would not be replacing me after all, he became quite cheerful.

Duo still doesn't smile very much, but he was at least looking around with interest. When we came to the new Gundam, he was all over it, crawling across its surface and poking his head into the cockpit. O waited for me to lose my temper and shout at my companion, but I ignored him. Duo needed something to think about, and I'm... less sensitive about my Gundam than I used to be. Not that I'll be letting any of the others put their grubby hands on it....

O also smoothed things over with the elders. That took a great deal of diplomacy, and I admire his patience. I should not have lost my temper, but after my first marriage, that they would dare.

I had to stop there. I pushed away the laptop and found some peace in meditation, but I am still very angry. It will doubtless fade with time. I said a few things that I shouldn't, but apparently I had at least one ally among the elders, as my second-hand apology was accepted.

Duo and I went back to the main colony. Saiming appears to have taken quite a shine to Duo and she is forcing both her sister and Chen to spend inordinate amounts of time with his former roommate. Now that flashes of the real Duo can be seen, Chen is actually becoming rather friendly. As Duo cannot leave the house, due to Zechs' continued search, they are playing a great many board games and card games together.

I spent most of my time with O, running tests on the new Gundam. For some reason, I cannot seem to call it Nataku. That name seems firmly rooted to the first Gundam. Strange. I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Thinking about Meiran. Thinking about the Gundams. Thinking about death. Thinking about Duo.

On the fifth day after our first visit to the lab, I was wandering L5 with Duo and Chen. We were sticking to the back streets, and Duo had found a baseball cap somewhere, covering his haircut to make it less obvious. He had also bullied someone (probably Saiming) into altering his new clothes until they resembled his original outfit. True, she had only changed the collar and the sleeves, but it looked right, somehow. I was wearing my own black and white and Chen was rather remarkably resplendent in his school garb of black with red dragons.

I should have been paying more attention to the recent events on Earth. I shouldn't have been concentrating on such stupid, petty, personal things. I should have known....

I was watching Duo tease Chen when one of my aunts came running down the street. She was grim-faced and her hands were shaking as she drew us into the nearest house, which happened to be that of Chen's eldest sister.

She wouldn't tell us what was going on, merely seated us before one of the video screens and turning it on. I watched the unfolding scene for almost a full minute...

 

Wufei's Part Ends

 

...and then he passed out. Well, actually, he turned this interesting shade of white and then passed out. Chen was looking pretty green too.

I didn't need to have Wu's analytical prowess to figure out what we had to do next....

We were almost to the shuttle bays when the shooting began. Chen and Saiming were carrying our duffles and I was supporting Wu, who was still pretty much out of it.

Unsurprisingly.

I sent Saiming and Chen home. There was no point in getting them killed. We had to get out of here before the dust settled. The only thing that had saved my butt thus far was that Zechs' search for me had been hampered by the need to kiss ass for the Alliance higher ups. It didn't take a genius to look at the fire fight by the Alliance mobile suit bay to figure out what was going on, or who would come out on top.

And OZ wanted me worse than ever now. No doubt so I could be publicly executed as an evil baby-killer. I had to get out of here. I had to get Wu out of here. Too many people around here knew who that particular Gundam belonged to, and without knowing the full story, might feel obligated to turn him over to OZ.

Over my dead body.

Probably.

I managed to get Wu to snap out of it. It took more time than we could really spare, but I wasn't going to be able to do anything useful if I had to drag his unresponsive carcass around at the same time. I finally had to haul Lt. Maxwell from the grave to do it, too. That got him, though. He took his own duffle and his sword (he picked it up after the fight with the elders, I have no idea from where, but it's fancier than the one he usually uses, nicer too) and I drew my gun and we headed toward the shuttle bays.

Wu was a very, very, very unhappy camper. He hadn't wasted any time on pain or grief for the victims, though I knew he felt them. He was sure that every single one of those deaths was the result of carelessness on his part and he was going to beat himself up over them after we got away.

That's what makes a Gundam pilot, ladies and gents. Survive first, angst later. I made a mental note to shout at him about the whole guilt thing later. He couldn't've known what would happen. It was not his fault.

But in the meantime he went straight from shock to fury. I believe I already told you about my resolution never to make him angry at me....

If only I'd remembered why Zechs gave me the creeps. But I was busy worrying about my hat, which I'd lost somewhere along the way.

 

Duo's Part Ends

 

I am a very lucky man.

For instance, I am still alive. It was sheer luck that I survived to make this report, and not at all to my credit.

I will never underestimate that young man again.

I knew that Duo Maxwell was still on L5. I could feel it. I also knew that when the take-over began he would make haste to the nearest escape route. When he reached the topside shuttle bay, I was waiting for him.

Treize once asked me what I thought made the Gundam pilots so successful. I told him that it was their basic unwillingness to accept defeat. I should have remembered that.

I won't forget it again.

Duo Maxwell is an enigma, and I have always been fond of puzzles. He intrigues me. His school records stated that he was fifteen years old, but he looked much older. Part of it was probably the haircut. There was a picture of him in his student file dating from before his first military haircut, and he looks much younger. Much more alive.

He wears his identity as a Cadet like a mask, although he did allow me to see beneath it once or twice. If all five of the Gundam pilots have as much going on beneath the surface, the entirety of the OZ Special Forces may not be enough to stop them.

A lone fifteen-year-old boy should not be able to do the things which our reports say that Maxwell has done. But I do not think that he is a boy, actual birthdate aside. His eyes are too old. He is a man and a killer of men and very, very dangerous. The soldiers under my command thought me mad to have him chained to his desk when I was working in the same room, but I knew that he could have killed me, just as easily as I could have killed him had our positions been reversed.

The aftermath of the fight in his suite had puzzled me and I should have pursued that, but I was too worried that he might have suffered permanent damage from that blow to the head that he took.

Everything is obvious with the benefit of hindsight.

When the two young men burst into the hangar, I was waiting - a squad of troops with me. They paused for a moment, giving me a good look both at Maxwell and his companion.

I should have realized that Chang 'Lian' was the real pilot of Gundam 05. I should have realized from his school records that Chang was not only easily capable of killing my crew, but was also more likely to be the avenging angel type. Those men, it occurred to me belatedly, had died without the usual marks that indicate blocking a blow with their arms or legs. They had all been very good at hand-to-hand combat. This means that their opponent(s) had to be that much better. That argues for either great skill, or a willingness to attack from behind and without mercy.

Resolved: Never get into a hand-to-hand fight with either Chang or Maxwell.

As realization dawned, I realized that I had hesitated a fraction of a second too long. It would have been quite beautiful to watch, if only it had been happening to someone else....

Without pausing or exchanging a word, the two pilots sprang in opposite directions, Maxwell producing a firearm, and Chang suddenly swinging a gleaming sword.

And here is where the training programs of OZ failed.

Being vastly outnumbered, with their enemy between them and their goal, holding no logical hope of winning, the two Gundam pilots moved forward. I lost six of the twelve men in my squad in the first twenty seconds. They were taken by surprise. After all, an out-numbered enemy is supposed to retreat....

Maxwell shot two of them before his gun jammed, and he continued to move forward, ducking and swaying as he crushed my sergeant's larynx with a single blow. He evaded the falling body, using it for further cover, and continued moving inward, speed unabated.

Chang moved faster and more gracefully. His sword cleared a path for him and blood actually fountained from his opponents, such was the speed at which he was moving. A slash to the side of the neck or the abdomen will do that....

And my squad hesitated, not sure of how to react to two such lethal children.... I was down to three men before I managed to make my own move. Swordsmen have a weakness, and it is probably not the one that you think.

Chang made a slash at the lone soldier still standing on my right, and the man moved in just the wrong direction. Steel grated on bone, and for an instant, his weapon was held fast.

That instant was all I needed. A single move and I had the pilot of Gundam 05 exactly where I wanted him.

 

Zechs' Part Ends

 

I took down the last soldier between me and Zechs, but when I looked up....

"Damn you," I breathed.

Zechs had Wufei pulled up against him, facing me, and a gun to Wu's temple. He was looking rather grim, and I couldn't blame him. We'd just destroyed twelve trained soldiers in a little under two minutes.

I was looking to make it thirteen....

It must have showed in my expression, because I could see his knuckles tighten on the gun. I forced myself to relax.

Wu wasn't doing anything. I looked at him more closely.

"Oh shit...."

Zechs noticed the direction of my gaze, but did not look down himself. "I'm afraid that the shock of earlier events has finally caught up to your friend," he told me.

Shit, shit, shit. I should have known. Zechs has some kind of sixth sense, I swear. He must have realized who Wu was within moments of seeing him come into the hangar with me.

And he was right. Wu's eyes had gotten all far-away again. I could almost hear what was going on in his head. It all started with the cliched line, "it's all my fault, I deserve to die...".

Speaking of cliches, "Let him go, Zechs. It's me you want!"

He cocked an eyebrow at me....I swear. Did I mention how much I hate that fucking mask? "This is true, but why settle for one if I can have you both?"

Hell, Wu had the right idea. The desire to bury my hands in that long platinum hair and tear it all out by the roots was well-nigh irresistible.

I squelched the urge. Now was not the time for fantasizing.

I sighed and pulled out my back-up gun. "If you shoot him, I will shoot you," I told him with a sigh. "And I don't think either of us wants that."

"I only need one pilot," Zechs told me softly. "I would prefer to have you. All I have to do is keep you here for another ten minutes and another squad will arrive to back me up."

Decision time. Please, don't let Wu be in any shape to hear or remember this....

"You can't have Wu. And after all the trouble he went to, I can't let you have me, either. I have a mission to fulfill and if I have to shoot you both to achieve it, I will." I glanced at Wu's unmoving form. He'd do the same."

 

Duo's Part Ends

 

I was shaken. He had gone from angry to laughingly resigned to cold-blooded determination in just a few sentences.

"You're bluffing."

He peeled his lips back from his teeth in what might have been called a smile by anyone who was half-blind and stupid. "I run, I hide, but I never lie...."

Maxwell was easily twice as dangerous as I had guessed. He was not bluffing. Well, there were several other things that I could try. I was not going to let him get away without a fight.

I stepped away from Chang, allowing the slender youth to sag to the ground.

Maxwell did not move, and kept his eyes on me as his friend sank into one of the numerous pools of blood now spotting the hangar floor.

"Get lost, Zechs," he told me. "And don't ever cross my path again."

I didn't move.

Maxwell's eyes narrowed. "Leave," he told me. "Now. I'm letting you live because you didn't just shoot my companion out of hand. I'm not known for my generous impulses, so don't push your luck."

"I'm not going to turn my back on either of you," I told him.

He smiled at that, a cold, bone-chilling smile. "What, you think we might be untrustworthy? That's a good one coming from someone who just framed an blameless young man for the massacre of almost a hundred innocent people."

I frowned. "That was none of my doing."

His smile grew nastier. I hadn't thought it possible. "As long as you willingly serve OZ and they serve Romafeller, you are condoning their actions."

Ouch. I had been right. This boy was no child. And he knew too much....

But he still didn't know just what had happened at the Noventa Estate. I knew what had been supposed to have happened, and the events which were to be known as the Noventa Massacre were not it.

"Wu?" Maxwell had not taken his eyes off me, but was now addressing the boy lying almost at my feet.

Chang twitched a little. I made a mental note to chase down that name. I was just assuming that he was a Chang, and Wu was obviously a diminutive of some kind. But I would find out who this other boy was.

They were fascinating. I could not think of a single full grown man who would have put himself through what Chang seemingly went through for Maxwell, though I could see why the Chinese boy did it.

"What's your name?" I asked suddenly.

"You can call me - Shinigami."

The God of Death. More and more interesting. "Your real name."

Maxwell raised his eyebrows. "I don't have a given name."

That surprised me. "What?"

His lips twisted bitterly. "I'm gutter garbage, a homeless orphan. I don't even know how old I am. I gave myself the name Duo, and I took the name Maxwell for...personal reasons."

That triggered something. "Maxwell... You pilot Gundam 02."

His eyes widened. "I hate it when you do that."

I smiled sweetly and made a second mental note. Research the Maxwell Church massacre again, soonest. However, in order to do so, I would have to survive this encounter. So I holstered my gun, bowed politely, and walked away.

He didn't shoot me. I'm luckier than I deserve.

I did not come out of that encounter empty-handed, either. He will regret not shooting me when he had the chance. I actually feel bad about that.

Believe it or not.


	19. This new beam cannon is amazing.

The three of us split up and took widely divergent paths back to the Earth. Zechs was still on L5, so the atmospheric re-entry was a great deal less exciting this time. At least it was for me. I can't speak for the others.

There are times when I actually crave boredom. I think most soldiers do. Not that excessive boredom does wonders for your concentration either, but it beats the alternative.

I ended up in India, mostly for lack of a better landing site. I had to unload my Gundam and get away from my landing site before the local OZ troops showed up. I was not looking forward to flying the new Wing for the first time under possible combat conditions. Dr. J's comments about the new system made me reluctant to test it out without technical back up.

Quatre, Trowa and I were to meet up at a designated point in the Sahara and wait for word of Duo and Wufei's return to Earth. We would then return to the place where the new Deathscythe was stashed, as they would certainly head there after landing.

I don't think a single plan has gone right since we lost Duo the first time.

I had no particular deadline as to when I had to meet Trowa and Quatre, so when I observed a fire fight between OZ forces and what were obviously rebel Alliance officers, I decided to work off some aggression. It wasn't that I was particularly anxious to help any members of the former Alliance, but OZ was the group that currently held my attention.

This new beam cannon is amazing.

Afterward, as I was about to fly away again, a woman came running up to one of Wing's feet. She looked vaguely familiar.

"Heero? Heero Yuy? Is that you?"

Ahhhh. She was the woman from the hospital. Major somebody.... It had been a long time since that incident. I hadn't gotten a good look at her at the time, but I have a memory for these things and her voice was a positive match. On a whim, I popped the hatch and stepped out.

I ended up staying the night with her resistance force.

She is a persuasive woman. Insisted that I call her Sally. She believed me when I told her that it hadn't been one of us who had destroyed Noventa and his supporters.

"Only an idiot would have thought so," she exclaimed, outraged. "The Colonies want peace and the whole world knows that, despite OZ and its feeble smear tactics!"

"That doesn't explain what happened to Noventa," I pointed out. "It was one of our Gundams that was used for that mess."

"Noventa was the best hope for peace, and everyone knew it," Sally agreed bitterly. "But we managed to steal footage of the beginning of that attack, and it is obvious to anyone who has seen the original Gundams in combat that it was not one of the original pilots in that thing."

"And how many people actually possess such knowledge of the original pilots and their tactics?" I asked her.

"Probably only me," she admitted with a sigh.

When I left in the morning, she had offered us her support, and that of her troops. It was good to know that there were decent people even among the former Alliance troops.

I wonder where the others are. I wonder if Duo and Wufei are all right. I wonder exactly when I started calling them by their given names.... I've always called Quatre by his given name, it just seemed wrong not to. I've always called Trowa - Trowa. I know that Barton isn't his name, but Trowa seems to fit, somehow.

It's odd. We all call Quatre by his given name, but the names by which we choose to call the others seem to define who they are to us. Perhaps I have finally accepted Duo and Wufei as companions and not just equals, other soldiers in the same war.

This whole episode has brought new insights for me. Some of them life altering. Some of them simply mildly interesting. Dr. J is afraid of me, something he was not before. I have decided that this is a good thing.

A very good thing.

But still, my thoughts constantly return to the other pilots. I hope they're all right.

I - miss them.  


* * *

  
End Heero's Part  


* * *

  
I am not very happy, right now.

I thought I had a secure landing area, right until those mobile suits popped up and shot me down. I've got a dislocated shoulder and a bump on the head. I'm crabby, too.

Luckily, I got my new Gundam out of the shuttle easily enough and I walked off the nearest cliff and into the ocean. I'm just lucky that Leos aren't terribly well suited to underwater combat and that the OZ commander was not inclined to waste her troops in such a fashion.

She seems to have some personal grudge against the Gundams.

I'd landed in Africa, so I didn't have as far to go to reach our rendezvous as, say, Trowa. I last saw his shuttle headed toward Northern Russia. I hope he's got some warm clothing. It's still winter in that hemisphere.

But it was going to be difficult to get to that rendezvous all the same. The OZ troops had gotten a good look at the Gundam, and I hadn't wanted to test the new systems in combat before I'd sat in the cockpit less than a minute and a half. So I'd run away.

Heero would have called it a strategic retreat. Wufei would probably have called it cowardly. Duo would have shouted at me for getting into such a mess in the first place, mostly out of worry. Trowa would have agreed with Heero probably, or Duo. Sometimes he's hard to predict.

However, my inadvertent brush with the Leos meant that they had full technical readouts on me, as well as visual identification, and probably a better idea of what my new Gundam could do than I did. I felt a splitting headache coming on.

They tracked me for quite a while, but I lost them around Madagascar. I hope.

I'm probably going to be the last one to that rendezvous, and Heero will be very displeased that I let the OZ troops see me. I'll remember the name of the squad leader who was lying in wait for me. Noin, it was. Clever woman, I'll give her that. She must have realized that I was unfamiliar with this machine. She almost had me, back there. Heero will know what action should be taken to take care of those data files before they get into the OZ main system. I hope.

I'll have to send him a message when I get back to dry land. I'd better ask him for a doctor as well, I suppose. My shoulder is killing me and it's going to get worse before it gets better.

I hope the others are doing better than I am.  


* * *

  
Quatre's Part Ends  


* * *

  
I landed in northern Russia without any problems. I did not see or meet any OZ forces. A completely routine landing.

I spent two days waiting in northern Africa before the others showed up. Yuy had made a detour to help Quatre with something. All Quatre would say was that I should never let Heero practice his first aid on me.

I've heard Maxwell talk about Yuy's approach to injuries and I can just imagine.

We took the Gundams to Howard, who was apparently vacationing in the Caribbean. I think I've seen more of the Earth in the past week than I did when we were first in residence here.

Howard could only work with one Gundam at a time, so while his current guinea pig worked with him, the other two would lie on the beach. We had a lot of time to kill. Chang and Maxwell did not appear.

After two weeks, even Howard began to worry.

Our new Gundams had been tested, and we understood them. They were much more effective than the originals. They moved faster and were easier to maneuver. I had more ammunition space, as well. Not that this would keep me from running out, but I would be able to do more damage before it did.

My Gundam is a walking tank for a reason, but all that fire power is merely an added bonus. I don't really need the guns. They make my job easier, that's all.

All three Gundams had a guidance system that was...frightening. I had Howard disconnect mine. So did Quatre. Heero thinks he can control his Gundam using the new system even though it hasn't been tested under combat conditions yet.

We'll see.  


* * *

  
Trowa's Part Ends  


* * *

  
Life sucks.

I've been saying that a lot lately. Don't get me wrong, things have improved amazingly since the afternoon I found Wu in my room at the school, but....

There's always that 'but'.

I got us into a shuttle and back to O's base without too much trouble. Wu was still out of it, although he'd respond to simple commands, if you spoke slowly and loudly enough.

I got them to load the Gundam and some supplies while I found Wu some clothing that wasn't soaked with OZ blood and washed him up a bit. Then I tucked him into the shuttle and took off.

I probably should have tried to snap him out of it before we left the L5 vicinity, but something about that whole run-in with Zechs was still bothering me and I wanted to get the hell out as fast as possible. That blonde bastard gave up just a little too easily.

I had missed something. Something important.

Damn it! I can't think of everything....

When I was sure that we weren't being pursued, I made for the moon. It wasn't too hard to hide the shuttle there. Except for the main base, the place is pretty much deserted. We couldn't go back to Earth until I'd gotten Wu back to normal. There was no way he was going to able to fight in the condition he was in - and I had no idea where they'd hidden my refurbished Deathscythe....

This was not going to be fun.

It wasn't that I didn't understand what Wu was going through. We all have a snapping point. His was rather firmly connected to his own view of 'right' and 'wrong'. Sometimes I think the two of us are from different worlds. My own problems stemmed from an inability to remember who I really was - a 'personal' problem, if you will.

Wu freaked out because he saw something horrible happen and decided that the terrible wrongs that had been done were somehow directly attributable to his actions.

Maybe it's because of who I am or what my childhood was like, but in his situation I would have been shocked and appalled, maybe even horrified - but not wigged out. Wu seems to have led a very sheltered life, initially. He's managed to develop both morals and ideals. Not that I don't have those things, I just could never afford to worry about them much. I had enough trouble just surviving.

So my problem was threefold:

1\. Get Wu's attention.

2\. Convince Wu that it wasn't his fault.

3\. Get Wu back into a Gundam, ASAP.

Yeah, I like to make lists. Keeps me focused.

Number 2 would be the really difficult part, so I decided to get to work on Number 1 right away. Wu was still in there somewhere, all I had to do was get him to respond to me. How hard could it be?

Two days of patient coaxing later convinced me that this wasn't the way to go. He still responded only sluggishly to commands and suggestions, and he really didn't seem to see or know me. Sometimes he would actually seem to be listening to me, and then he'd just drift away again. This was not working.

For example:

Me: Wu, would like some dinner?

Wu: ....

Me: How about sandwiches again?

Wu: ....

Me: Sandwiches it is, then.

or better yet:

Me: Wu, its time for bed.

Wu: ....

Me: Aren't you tired?

Wu: ....

Me: Right, bed it is, then. Did you need help with your pjs?

Wu: ....

God. Trowa's more talkative on a bad day!

So I resorted to playing dirty.

I waited until he seemed to be aware of his surroundings again. That took another day or so of endlessly frustrating attempts to get him to respond. Not that I minded expending the effort. I mean, he'd been there for me over the past month.

Through Hell with Lt. Maxwell, actually, but that's sort of beside the point.

When I was sure that he was at least hearing my voice, I asked, "What would your wife think about the way you're behaving?"

It was cruel, I know. But I'd spent a lot of time with Wu's cousins while he was with Master O, and I'd learned a lot about his marriage. Yeah, I'm nosy. So what?

Wu responded as I'd hoped. Well, mostly.

He punched me out.

At least he was paying attention....  


* * *

  
Duo's Part Ends  


* * *

  
I hate Duo Maxwell.

Can't he ever leave well enough alone? Of course not. If he could, then he wouldn't be Duo.

I snapped out of my intense and all-consuming misery to find myself with two broken fingers and Maxwell slowly sliding down a wall across from me.

My first reaction was horror. What had I done? What had I been thinking? How could I have attacked the only person who really cared about me?

I dropped to my knees beside him, noting that I'd done a splendid job of nailing him almost in the same spot as his previous injury. He was out like a light.

Marvelous.

I picked him up and found my way to the crew quarters. I tucked him into bed and sat beside him, trying to figure out what must have gone on while I was wallowing in self-pity.

There was more to it than that, but I don't feel that I need to share it with you.

Duo had been remarkably patient. I don't remember much of what went on since that - incident at Noventa's, but I do know that he saved us both back in the shuttle bay. He watched out for me and took care of me when I'd succumbed to weakness and uncertainty, even though he was still pretty shaky himself.

Then I remembered the last thing he said to me before I'd tried to break his jaw. Let's analyze this, shall we?

I was angry. Why? I didn't want to...share Meiran with anyone. The memories were now all that I had left to show that she'd even existed. Nataku....

Stop. Don't think about it, don't dwell on it. I went to find an ice pack for Duo's jaw.

I was angry. We've established that. I calmed down and set about trying to ascertain if I'd given Duo another concussion. I was also confused. When and where had he....

Ah, Saiming. The interfering woman. She must have been with Chen and Duo when they were eavesdropping on my 'conference' with the elders. And whose idea was that I wonder?

Why would Duo care? Enough to ask about her, I mean. I know damn well that Saiming would not have volunteered any information. She knows very well how I feel. So why?

Gratitude? I don't think so. Curiosity? Possibly. But I've never known Duo to be the type to dig up the painful past simply as an exercise to ward off boredom. And what else had he asked about?

I'm wandering away from the subject at hand.

I shouldn't have hit him. It was obvious that he'd been hoping for some sort of violent reaction. I was vaguely aware that he'd been trying to get me to snap out of my shock/depression for several days.

Days. Dear Gods, how long had it been since that... And what the hell had happened in the shuttle bay? And where were we? I had been concentrating so hard on what had happened, that I had not thought to question my surroundings. I had been content to let Duo choose our path....

I am definitely obsessed.

And I just slugged the object of my obsession with enough force to break two of my fingers.... And I was focused enough on that obsession that I hadn't noticed the pain until just now.

Bloody hell.  


* * *

  
End Wufei's Part  


* * *

  
The last time I felt this bad I'd just been hit by a car. True, I had managed to roll out of the way at the last minute and just been grazed by the vehicle in question, but the feeling was sickeningly similar.

Someone was holding something cool to my throbbing jaw and gently stroking my temples. It felt pretty good. The coolness and the fingers, I mean. My jaw felt like I'd just used it to land the shuttle on.

The fingers were suddenly withdrawn.

"Open your eyes, Maxwell."

Ouch. Maxwell again. Oh well, I deserved it.

I managed to pry open my eyes and allowed myself to be subjected to all the regular tests for concussion. They were becoming depressingly familiar.

That's when I noticed Wu's fingers. Man, he may be a martial artist, but he hadn't exactly been himself when he socked me. I know broken fingers when I see them.

We had a pleasant little exchange vis a vis taking care of our respective selves when injured, and I ended up enduring having him pull out some pain killers and check my jaw for breakage. Then I got to retaliate by setting his fingers.

And a good time was had by all.

Wu's been acting strange. Before the Noventa incident, he'd been watching me like a hawk. And now? He's not currently speaking to me, other than to ask me how my head feels. He's angry. Really angry. At me. Broke my resolution already, dammit. I wish I could tell what else is going on.

It's hard to ignore another person when the two of you are the only ones in a small, enclosed space. But he was managing it very well, thanks.

So. Objective one has been accomplished. Wu is his normal, cranky self. More cranky than usual, actually. He feels bad about slugging me. Worse than bad. I don't think he's ever raised a hand to anyone before, outside of combat, that is. He's acting like a condemned murderer, or a child beater.

I guess I can understand how he’d feel bad about it, but I'd viciously probed the unhealed wounds of someone in an emotionally unbalanced state. And I'd done it deliberately. I was lucky that he hadn't killed me. Sure, he should feel something for knocking me on my ass, but overwhelming guilt was not it.

Objective two was going to be a bit difficult to accomplish while he was ignoring me so strenuously, but....

Oh. Realization strikes. Duh. Of course he's avoiding me.

Well, this might make things either easier, or much, much more difficult. But the direct approach is always worth a try, right? And what can he do to me? Finish breaking my jaw? Toss me out the airlock? Kill me slowly and leave my corpse as a warning to the OZ troops not to mess with Chang Wufei?

I'm not sure that this is such a good idea after all....

But the guys need us. I need to remind him of the mess we're all currently in, which is not going to be fun. I need to convince him that I trust him, and that he can trust me. If he gets angry at me, that's okay. We're professionals, sort of. He can still work with me, even if he never wants to speak to me again.

Right?

It's for his own good.

Really.  


* * *

  
End Duo's Part  


* * *

  
I was sulking. I'll freely admit it. I was trapped in an enclosed space, thousands of miles from anywhere, with Duo Maxwell. I was in hell.

I spent the first two days after I struck Duo by avoiding him. He assisted me in this by actively staying out of my way. It wasn't as though he was afraid that I'd strike him again, thankfully, more as if he wanted me to have time to think - to relax.

It didn't help. I was growing more and more tense, almost as if waiting for the other shoe to drop. I didn't need time to think. I didn't want an opportunity to reflect. Not about Meiran, not about the Noventa massacre, and especially not about what I'd done to Duo.

I finally resorted to using one of the small cargo bays to practice sword kata. I tried to meditate, but had only limited success. I immersed myself in exploring the systems of my new Gundam. That didn't help either.

I was spending almost every second dwelling on Duo Maxwell. Why had he decided to become my friend? When had I accepted him? What was he thinking? Why did he care whether I lived or died? It wasn't gratitude for what I'd done.

He'd risked his life to send me that original message from the school. If they'd had any suspicions at that point, the codes he'd used to send me that message were easily broken, and they would have discovered his secret.

And he hadn't expected me to come rescue him. He'd simply sent the note to warn me - and at considerable risk to his own life.

Why then?

I'm obsessing again.

Re-reading this, I've come to the conclusion that I don't care. I am obsessed. So what? It's not as if Duo is really in any shape to notice. He's still all wrapped up in his own problems, and in keeping out of my way.

That's what I believed, anyway.

But it keeps being brought to my attention that I really don't know Duo Maxwell at all.

When I headed back to the galley for something to eat, he was waiting for me. He had a serious look on his face, and something in his hands....

"Wufei, I need you to do me a favor."

There are hidden depths to Duo Maxwell....

"You want me to what?!"

Duo looked down at his feet and extended the objects in his hands to me. "I need you to cut my hair."  


* * *

  
End Wufei's Part  


* * *

  
It took more courage than I thought to ask for Wu's help. I thought he was going to choke when I asked him to cut my hair for me. I'd found my braid in his luggage. He knew how much it meant to me, if not why.

"Why?" The shocked look on his face told me that I'd at least gotten his attention.

I sighed. "Because I can't do it myself."

He frowned, pushing his own hair out of his eyes. "That's not what I meant, and you know it."

I had thought about this for a while, and knew that I'd have to tell him about it. "The braid was something that I kept to help me remember something. Thanks to you, I still have it."

He actually blushed. I ignored that, and continued. "But now, my hair reminds me of something else."

I ran my hand through my much shorter hair as Wu sank into a chair across from me in the tiny galley.

"What?" he asked me.

"It reminds me that there's really no one I can trust," I told him grimly.

He gave me a hurt look, shock written across his features.

Damn. I can really put my foot in it, can't I? "That's not quite what I meant...."

"What did you mean then?"

Great. Now he was getting pissed again. I reached out and grabbed his arm with my free hand. "I thought you knew that I trusted you!" I snapped. "We're Gundam pilots. We trust each other."

I could see that he finally got it. "But no one else," he breathed.

I nodded. "No one else."

There was a long pause.

"All right," he said finally, taking the razor and the scissors from my hand. "I'll do it. But I think it's a crime." His voice dropped almost to a whisper for that last sentence.

"Thank you."

He needed to know that I trusted him. That I'd let him cut my hair. That I'd be able to relax while he stood behind me with sharp instruments. At some level, I had to get him to realize that I truly trusted him with my life.

God, please let his work. Otherwise, he's going to think I'm betraying him.  


* * *

  
End Duo's Part  


* * *

  
Giving a trim to someone with hair as short as Duo's was fairly easy. But my hands shook the entire time, and it wasn't because of the hair cut.

He was silent until I was almost finished.

"I had a talk with Master O about your new Gundam...."

I nearly dropped the razor. I knew he had an ulterior motive with this. He had his back to me, naturally, so I couldn't see his face.

"And?" I asked, concentrating on not shaving half of his remaining hair away.

"That new operating system that they developed, the Zero system? He said that you could run it no problem, because you're so focused."

I nodded. The thing was hell on your imagination, but you could learn to ignore it if you just concentrated on what your main objective was. I had forgotten that he couldn't see me, and he took my silence as an effort to ignore him.

"Wu, he ran some tests and said that I could run it too."

That shook me. "Duo, that thing is vicious!"

He shrugged, nearly causing me to take off rather more hair than would have been attractive. "Yeah, I noticed." His voice was distant, unhappy.

"You actually tested it?? When did this happen?" I was angry now. That system was fully capable of chewing you up and spitting you out.... It worked against your insecurities and your fears. And Duo was still having problems with Lt. Maxwell. NOT a good idea.

"After you wigged out. We needed to know if I could run it if things got hairy." There was a long pause while I tried to process this information. "The guys need support, and as long as we stay here, they're on their own, with Gundams that haven't even been tested yet. Wu, if you're gonna stay all locked up inside, I'm going to have to take your Gundam and help them."

"Wha-what?"

His voice was vanishingly soft. "Wu, I'm sorry. But if I have to leave you, I will."

I sat down hard, still clutching the scissors. I was still so wrapped up in what I felt, in what I wanted, that I had forgotten my responsibility, to the other pilots and to our mission. I closed my eyes tightly and tried to think.

As I fought with myself, warm arms wrapped around me.

"It'll be all right, Wu. You're just going to have to learn to let go. You can't use the new system while you're all tied up in knots."

Let go. Something I'd never been good at. Could I manage it? Was it possible?

"It wasn't your fault, Wu. You know it, and I know it. Give us a little while, and the world will know it. C'mon Wu. Relax."

Relax? Yeah right.

Those same hands took the scissors away from me. "Just relax, Wu," he repeated. "You have all night to think about it. But do we have to leave, and soon. Why don't you just go to bed. You can make your decision in the morning."

I opened my eyes as he tugged me to my feet. He was smiling sympathetically, but there was an iron-hard resolve at the back of his eyes. "I don't want to leave you, Wu. But if I have to, I will."

When did he become so strong? My memory suddenly dredged up a fragment of conversation. The familiar voice was ice cold....

'I have a mission to fulfill and if I have to shoot you both to achieve it, I will.....He'd do the same.'

Would I?

Yes, I would. I let him take me off to bed, already knowing what my answer would be.  


* * *

  
End Wufei's Part  


* * *

  
It was just over two weeks after our own return to Earth that Heero found an OZ report stating that another shuttle had arrived, this one from the Moon.

It landed in Southern Argentina and by the time the local OZ troops got there, it had been destroyed. There was no sign of its passengers or the Gundam they supposed that it had been carrying.

Heero was still grumbling about having to clean up after my encounter with Noin. I guess he's not sure he managed to get every copy of her report. It won't happen again, though. We've all been checked out on our Gundam's new systems, even though we still haven't taken them into combat.

With news of Duo and Wufei's return, we made our way back to where wed hidden the new Deathscythe. It's got a different name, I think. Deathscythe Hell, wasn't it? Our self-proclaimed Shinigami will be thrilled.

Trowa thought it was terribly funny. Heero just rolled his eyes. He had managed to pry the reason for Deathscythe's rebuild out of G. Apparently, Duo has done a great deal of personal tinkering with the stealth systems of his Gundam and G can't figure out how to duplicate the effects. This meant that G had to build the Deathscythe Hell around the stealth system, instead of merely installing a new system in a completed Gundam.

We got to the hiding place first, as we had been closer to begin with. Trowa went over the Gundam with a fine toothed comb a second time and came back with a rather surprising observation.

Deathscythe Hell didn't have Dr. J's new system.

Why didn't Duo's Gundam have the Zero system? Wing Zero had it, the new Sandrock and new Heavyarms had it. According to J, even Wufei's new Gundam, Altron, had it.

Heero pointed out that the 'punk' wouldn't have been able to handle the Zero system on the best day of his life, and the new Gundam had been handed over to him, not Duo.

A valid point. On the other hand, it again might have something to do with the various tinkering that Duo has done to the Gundam. I went over it myself then, and discovered something rather surprising. They _did_ attempt to install the new operating system. And Deathscythe rejected it. Heero checked my findings and confirmed them, adding that it was impossible.

"The programming already in place should have accepted the new system without question. It can't just spit it back out like an organ transplant rejection."

But it did. I think we need to have words with Duo about his programming skills. That Gundam gives me a creepy feeling down the back of my neck.

Which reminds me, we need to go check on the little creep.... uh, boy, soon. Rashid assured me that everything was fine the last time I contacted him, but I believe we all want words with the pseudo-pilot.

Short words, preferably. To make them easier to understand. He lacks a certain quickness of wit and comprehension which defines the man he tried to replace.

And Heero still has to have that conversation with Relena Dorlan. Or rather, Peacecraft. Several interesting things appear to have happened while we were all chasing our tails over Duo's disappearance.

At any rate, we settled in to wait for Wufei and Duo. We didn't have too long to wait.

Wufei's Alton is rather impressive. He flew it in, believe it or not. He brought Duo along in one of the shuttles escape pods to protect him from the acceleration. There really wasn't enough room in that cockpit for two.

They've both changed again. Duo seems a lot better. Wufei.... He obviously took what happened at Noventa's very hard indeed. I wonder how differently I would have reacted, or indeed, any of us.

But Wufei kept the Zero system, and seems to be handling it well. Duo doesn't seem to have any doubts as to his fitness anyway. It took Duo only seconds to make himself totally at home with Deathscythe Hell. I had forgotten that he had already seen the specs and had a chance to operate it.

He asked about the pseudo-pilot, but Wufei and Heero both told him to forget it. He obeyed, but not without a dirty look for them both.

I saved the expression for further perusal later. I do believe he was actually pouting.

We had an emergency council of war.

Trowa will go back to OZ. He is the best of us at infiltration and subterfuge. Wufei and Duo will return to our original mission of destruction and chaos. I will work with Heero as we try to sort through the OZ files and find a link to Romafeller. We must find out what they have planned.

Thanks to Heero, all five of the Doctors and Professors have been brought to heel. Actually, it seems that O was on our side all along.

That's how our world is, now. Divided neatly down the middle into them and us. Howard is tentatively one of us, as is O, but we will only trust them provisionally. The only people we can really trust are each other.

It's the pilot. It has always been the pilot. The five of us are a unit. Not really equals, as we are too different, but five parts of a perfect whole. Our Gundams define our mission and our goals, but they are not who we are.

We will continue to take and use the mission information generated by our former 'masters', but we will no longer trust it. We will choose our own path. We will forge our own destiny.

We will put an end to OZ and the Romafeller foundation. We will shake the very world that our people created. We will make a future for all mankind.

We will survive.

And we will triumph.  


* * *

  
End Quatre's Part  


* * *

  
The room was only dimly lit. It was an office, opulently appointed with velvet curtains over the windows and velvet cushions on the chairs.

The small lamp on the desk and the viewscreen beside it were the only sources of light in the room. The viewscreen showed Heero Yuy, bound to a hospital bed. As the short video-clip played, there was a sudden explosion and the footage ended.

It was replaced with a still-picture of Chang Wufei, dressed in black with his hair falling into his face. A male voice spoke:

"His name is Chang Wufei. He is the eldest of his generation, but we were unable to find out more before some enterprising soul erased his files. There were quite a large number of files, indicating that he is, or rather, was someone of great importance within his family."

A long fingered hand reached out and gently traced the arrogant expression of complete assurance that was displayed by the still picture.

"Hmmmm. Accustomed to command. Look elsewhere for the information. The Chang clan keeps extensive personal records in the name of preserving their family history. They will not have erased those."

"Yes sir. We do have his fingerprints and several other pictures and recordings from his temporary stay at the base on L5."

The picture on the screen changed again. A split screen showed Duo Maxwell both before and after his Cadet's haircut.

"Hmmmm again." The voice was amused. "There is quite a difference there. A gutter rat, he told you? I very much doubt that there is no more to him than that. Have you looked further into the Maxwell Church episode?"

"Yes, and there is little doubt that he is the same Duo mentioned in the records. I wonder where he was, that day."

"We may never know. You have all his school records?"

The second voice was sober. "I do. But all video footage following his capture was carefully erased, probably by Chang."

"Unsurprising." There was a dry chuckle. "What about the other footage?"

"Running now, sir."

The pictures of Duo faded away to be replaced by video footage of the encounter in the shuttle bay of L5 colony. There was silence during the minute and a half that it took for the battle to come to an end.

Again, one long finger traced Wufei's figure, frozen in the last, graceful lunge which had ended in his capture.

"Very interesting."

"Yes sir."

Treize turned from the viewscreen to look at his friend and subordinate. "Zechs, those two could be very useful."

"My thoughts exactly." Zechs smiled grimly.

"Find them," Treize's voice was soft, but there was a note of predatory interest that could be clearly heard. "Find them and bring them to me. This could make everything a great deal easier."

"It will be a pleasure."

"Of that I have no doubt. But be very careful. They will not believe anything that we tell them, no matter how true it is. And they are very, very dangerous."


End file.
